The grin came back to his face, just before he lowered his mask again. “What else? Snakes.” The other two traded worried glances. “Don’t worry, you guys. We’re gonna have fun. C’mon, over the wall. You two first.”

“Why us first?”

Tommy sighed with exasperation. His hand slipped back into his pocket. “Are we gonna go through that again?”

Doug bent and gave Larry a foothold, then, straining, boosted him to the top of the wall. He followed next. Tor was not far behind them. He dropped into the pitch blackness on the other side a few feet from them.

“I don’t like this,” Larry muttered.

The woods were dense and shadowy. What few shafts of moonlight sifted through the canopy overhead served only to backlight the swirling fog that lapped at the tree trunks like milky water. Tommy fished a small disposable flashlight from his jacket pocket but the diminutive beam was impotent in these surroundings.

“Nobody chickens out,” he told them. Standing apart from them, he was little more than a vague shadow with a bulbous head and a hand in his pocket. “Nobody.”

“Tommy?” Doug half-whispered. “What if the Millers don’t scare, not even with this stuff? What then?”

“Yeah,” Larry said softly. “What then?”

“Then . . . we think of something else.” He chuckled. “Know what I mean? I think the house is in this direction.” He started off into the fog.

Doug leaned over to Larry. “I always knew he was an asshole,” he whispered, “but I didn’t know he was nuts. Let’s—”

“Why whisper?” Tommy asked, suddenly right beside them. “We’re not anywhere near the house yet. There’s no one out here to hear you. Right?” He held out an arm to show the way. The two grudgingly started in that direction, walking deeper into the primal wood.

And as they walked, the darkness waited for them and listened with its one good ear.

To the north of Isherwood the main road skirted the base of a hill before it left the town altogether, and it was on that bend that a second, less-traveled lane branched away from it. The sign identified it as Moffit Trail, and it climbed that gentle bosom of earth in a long, languid spiral. A taxi, one of Isherwood’s three, turned onto that side road in the wee hours of the morning and followed the gradual incline. Its potential destinations were limited; there were few houses on the hill, and most of them less than halfway up. But it passed them by. It drove almost to the crest, where an old two-story boardinghouse stood, and that was where it eased onto the shoulder and parked near the mailbox, right near the walkway and the gate in the fence. And it waited there with the motor running.