When he heard something behind him, he glanced back and saw Hank had made it down the incline to the river. He reached the other side and scrambled up the short bank on his hands and knees, ignoring the dull ache in his palm. The building was no more than twenty feet from him now, and next to it was the opening to the old mine shafts, a small, dark square built into a rise in the ground. He watched for movement, and saw a mass of footprints all around the walls and leading off in different directions. There was no sound other than the soft moan of the wind around the corners of the building.

David’s throat tightened and the adrenaline surge turned his stomach. He stood out in the open and felt incredibly vulnerable and helpless. The gun shook in his hand as he held it out against the shadows that slipped around the building’s strange angles and windows. Thoughts ran in fragments around in his head, images melting and blending into one. Me standing on the driveway in the cold next to the pile of snow, little Chuckie Howard perched on the roof and taunting in his high, singsong voice…

In the end, it was the thought of his wife and daughter that drove him forward through the icy fog of terror that threatened to overpower his rational mind—that and his stubborn refusal to let Chuckie Howard win this one last time. He stood up to his full height, cocked the gun in his hand and went for the door of the rotted, old mine building. As he did, he had a nagging feeling he was ignoring something important.

And then it hit him like a bulldozer, this shouted warning inside his head, WATCH OUT DADDY HE’S COMING, and he wasn’t sure if he went down through the reaction of pure reflex or through the simple weight of the thing leaving a bruised and bleeding trail through his mind.

Something swished through the air and he felt a dull pain in his shoulder. The knife sliced past an inch in front of his left eye. He threw himself backward and rolled over and over on the snow, struggled to find his feet and realized he had dropped the gun. He glanced upward to see a huge, looming figure reaching out for him with monstrously long, misshapen arms and hands and a face that was creased with ugly white scars. The glint of the knife flashed again, and he knew he was a dead man.

A cracking sound split the silence, then another, and the man’s right elbow exploded outward in a gory mass of blood and tissue, flinging him back against the wall of the building and throwing quarter-sized droplets of blood against the grimy window.