Page 5 of My Halloween Hunter

I run the rest of the way. I lock the door for the first time since I got here and stand with my back against it, and I get my hand down the front of my jeans before I've even taken my boots off and come so hard, so fast, that my knees give out and I slide down the door to the floor, shaking, with my cheek pressed to the wood.

That night I can't keep myself from the loft window.

The moon's up, and the frost on the slope above the cabin is silver, and he's there. A tall dark shape among the trunks, forty yards up, not moving and not hiding. His face is turned up toward the window, toward me, and I can't see it. The moon catches his eyes above something dark wrapped across the lower half of his face, and that's all — eyes, and a black cloth where a mouth should be, on a man far bigger than any man I know, standing in the cold as if he's been planted there.

I drop below the sill with my hand over my mouth. When I work up the nerve to look again, the slope is empty.

In the morning I unlock the door.

On the fourth day I go looking for where he stands.

It takes me twenty minutes of climbing through the old pine above the cabin, and then the ground changes under my boot. The needles there are packed flat and dark in a patch about the size of a doormat, and in the middle of it are two boot prints, big and side by side and sunk deep.

I turn and look where they face.

The cabin. The whole east side of it — the porch, the window over the sink where I stand every night with the curtain open, and above it the loft window, which has no curtain at all.

Nobody packs ground that hard in one night. He's stood in this spot every night since I arrived, in the cold, watching me wash my mug and climb the ladder, watching the loft window while I lay up there with my hand in my underwear listening for him.

My knees give out, and I crouch in the needles because it's that or fall.

The fear comes cold and fast, and the heat comes right behind it, riding it, using everything the fear stirs up — the pounding, the shaking, the dry mouth — until I'm crouched in a forest over two boot prints with my underwear soaked through. When I lay my hand inside one of them, it fits with room to spare.

I stand up.

I look up at the loft window, a dark square under the eaves, and my voice comes out thin in the cold. "You can't even see me up there. All those hours, and you can't even see me."

The silence doesn't answer, but it leans closer.

"I sleep on my left side," I tell it, and I hear my voice shake. "Facing this wall. In case you've been wondering."

I walk back down to the cabin on legs that don't work properly.

That afternoon I go down to the store. Edna's carving a pumpkin on the counter when I come in, newspaper spread under it and orange pulp to her elbows.

"There's a man," I say.

"There's several." She scoops out a fistful of seeds.

"One who's been at my cabin. At night."

The spoon stops. Edna wipes her hands on a towel, takes the glasses off her head, folds them and sets them down, and looks at me properly for the first time since I walked in four days ago.

"Are you frightened, sweetheart?"

"Yes." She keeps looking, so I give her the rest. "Not only."

She nods as if I've answered a question she asked a long time ago. "Cade," she says.

The name drops into my stomach like a stone into a well, one syllable, hard at both ends.

"Who is he?"

"Guides hunters in the fall. Lives up the east track. He checks every cabin in this valley and hasn't once in ten years set foot inside one." She picks up the carving knife. "Never hurt a living thing he didn't mean to eat."

"That isn't comforting."

"Wasn't meant to be." She cuts a triangle eye out of the pumpkin in one clean stroke. "He's never wanted anything either, not in ten years. A man like that starts wanting, he doesn't stop."