When I was a kid, traveling the country with my parents in the RV, we’d spent much of one summer in a caravan park in Montana near the Little Belt Mountains. I’d really enjoyed it. There were the remains of railways and mines to explore, cold streams to splash in, rugged trails to follow, and a lot of neat wildlife. I made friends with a raccoon that loved toffee, a particularly brave chipmunk that would hop right onto my outstretched hand for a few nuts, and a girl from Canada named Sally who was into catching insects. Sally carried around her insect of the day in a Tic Tac container, which she liked to show off. Her prepubescent interest in entomology rubbed off on me, and soon I had my own collection of ants, beetles, butterflies, crickets, so forth. Every now and then we’d have a beetle death match. A cereal box with the back cut away served as the gladiatorial ring. Usually the chosen beetles would try to escape rather than fight each other, but they were still fun to watch and egg on. One evening, however, I left the gladiatorial ring outside during a light rainfall, and the cardboard became soggy and warped. The cereal boxes in my RV were still mostly full, so I couldn’t make a new ring. I knew Sally would blame me and maybe beat me up—she was two years older and a bit of a bully—so I went to the edge of the campground to search the line of garbage bins for a cereal box. I tipped the first bin over as quietly as I could and prodded through the trash. That’s when I heard a deep chuff. I turned, scanning the dark, and spotted a huge black bear no more than ten feet from me. It stood on all fours, a plastic bag hanging from its snout, just standing there and watching me. In fact, it must have been standing there and watching me for a good minute.

This had always held the title of the scariest moment of my life—until now—when I turned around and saw the eye peering through a hole in the wall, watching us.

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The hole was an excised knot in a plank of wood maybe three feet from the ground. It was the size of a golf ball. The iris of the eye peering through it appeared brownish-red, surrounded with white. It gleamed wetly in the candlelight.

Then it blinked.

Elizaveta and Rosa leapt to their feet but remained oddly silent, as if they’d lost their voices. I was on my feet too, my blood icy sludge in my veins. I snagged the pistol from the waistband of my shorts. I raised it toward the devilish eye and squeezed the trigger.

Click.

The safety!

I found it, flicked it off, aimed at the eye again.

It was gone.