Later, while the night watchman still snored at his desk, a lone figure stole from the back of the center. He wore a hat, and a thick coat with the collar turned up. Over his shoulder he had slung a form wrapped in a sheet. In the other hand he held a shovel.
The figure slipped into the woods. He carried the shape into the mountains, the pale moon a sliver that turned the lichen-covered trees to ice. Eventually, he figured he was far enough away. He began to dig under a tree, noticing how easily the sandy soil loosened and fell away.
When the grave was deep enough, he pushed the body in. There was no prayer. The dead are dead; only the living have hope.
Brett Jarvis was having a bad night.
He had been kicked out of the bar in Wheel Stone and had somehow driven back to the beach at Eagle Cove, though he couldn’t remember doing so. When he came to, he was sitting on a log on the beach, listening to the ocean howl in the dark. He was dressed warmly, in an oilcloth jacket and worn boots, but all he felt was the rush of cold blood inside his heart.
He looked at the bottle in his hand. It was empty.
He tossed it away.
Getting up, he stumbled down the beach.
Hours later—he had no idea how many—Brett found himself deep in the woods. He wasn’t lost, though. Brett Jarvis had grown up in the woods; his dad had been a hunting guide, and Brett knew the mountains like the back of his hand. He didn’t even need a compass. He could orient himself by the direction of the salt wind.
The trees were dark around him.
I’ve been in a blackout, he thought. Oh well. He had been in worse ones. Once, four days had passed and he’d woken up in Astoria, vomiting on the boardwalk near a bull sea lion who had been watching him with curious interest.
Chuckling to himself, sick with fear at what he had become, Brett tasted the salt wind and righted himself toward the sea. If he kept walking—or crawling, if need be—he’d eventually reach the ocean. Then he could figure out exactly where he was, and head home. He didn’t want to spend the night in the woods. It was cold, and wet, and the sand fleas were bad this year.
Brett was crawling, laboriously, over a rotted log when he heard the noise.
Brett knew all about forest noises at night. There were the calls of owls, and the soft rumple of voles under the soil. Deer and elk moved in the brush, mountain lions chirped, and the rare wolves howled. There was the distant sound of the ocean, and the feeling of the underground streams, rushing under the rocky mountains into the sea.
Even utterly trashed, Brett Jarvis knew the difference between a forest sound and a human one.
This was a human sound.
Someone was in the brush, a dozen or so yards ahead of him.
He slowed, peering intently into the dark trees. Suddenly, he realized he wasn’t far from Brightwood. That place gave him the creeps. When he was a child, his mother’s favorite threat was that she’d give Brett away. She never did, but he had lived in fear he might wind up in a place like Brightwood, where boys never got to go hunting or fishing or even just sit on a piece of driftwood.
Ahead of him, illuminated in the pale moonlight, there was a creature walking through the woods. The forest shadows made it seem ten feet tall. The creature was carrying what looked like a body wrapped in a shroud. At the end of its long arm was a shovel.
Brett stopped, frozen.
The creature did not see him. It kept moving, through the woods, carrying the body.
Constable Roberts looked across his desk. Brett Jarvis, smelling like a rat had died inside his mouth and been left to rot there for a few weeks, was nearly collapsed across his desk. His eyes were bright red from burst blood vessels.
“You gotta do something,” Brett muttered.
“Sasquatch doesn’t exist, Brett.”
“Yeah, but I saw him.”
Constable Roberts wasn’t going to argue with a drunk.
“Okay. You saw Sasquatch.”
“He’s stealing boys from that place.”
“Brightwood?”
“Yeah. He had a shovel. He was going to bury him.”
