The next several outbuildings were also empty. Dale’s flashlight beam moved across hanging sickles, scythes, grass cutters, plow disks, extra cornrollers, harrow disks, unnamed blades—all rusted red-brown. His flashlight beam was fading, the batteries dying.
Dale walked farther from the farmhouse, its few visible lights seeming very far away. Out by the rusting gas tank, which hung like some great spider’s egg from the iron girders, one pair of wheel ruts led to the barn, another south along the fence at the edge of the empty field. Dale walked out into the field, slapped the flashlight hard against his palm to brighten the beam, and repeatedly called Michelle’s name into the night, pausing each time to listen for any response from the dark fields. Nothing. Not even an echo or distant dog bark. Dale walked up and down the rutted lanes, shining the flashlight beam on bare patches of mud, hoping for dog prints, a human bootprint, a shred of cloth. . . anything as a sign. The ground was frozen and unrevealing.
Panting slightly now, his breath fogging into the freezing predawn air, flashlight glow as dim as a dying candle, Dale walked to the giant barn and leaned his weight into sliding back the huge door. The warped wood and rusted steel screeched in protest, but finally opened enough for him to slip in.
The harvesting combine still filled the space, the cornrollers reaching for him like faded red teeth.
“Michelle!!”
Something rustled in one of the high lofts, but it was too small a sound to be a woman. The hounds couldn’t have hauled her up there. He shined the light up toward the impossibly high rafters and hidden lofts, but the cone of light was too dim now to reach that far. But if she escaped the dogs, she could be up there, hiding, injured.
Dale tucked the flashlight in his jacket and climbed the nearest ladder, feeling the rot in the wood and smelling the rot in the boards and straw of the barn itself. The structure was old and the ladder soft. He made sure that he never had both hands holding a single rung at one time—if one rung let go, he wanted to be connected to something solid.
Thirty feet up and he was high enough to peer over the edge of the wall and into the dark void of the first loft. The roof of the combine—the same combine that had killed his friend Duane forty years ago, chewing him up like so much offal?—was below him now, looking scabrous in the dying light. Dale shook the flashlight again, but this time the beam only dimmed further.
This loft was empty except for matted straw, some rotted tack, and a skull.
Dale crawled into the loft area, feeling the thin, rotted wood creak beneath his weight, groping ahead for the skull. It barely filled his palm, the long yellow teeth pressing toward the blue vein in his wrist. What the hell had it been? A rat? It seemed too large for a rat. A raccoon or fox? How did it get up here?
He set the skull back, swept the flashlight uselessly back and forth toward the other black rectangles of the loft, and called Michelle’s name again. The only response was a fluttering of a barn owl or sparrows in their nest.
The flashlight died completely before he started down the ladder. Dale tucked it into his jacket and checked the luminous dial of his watch, noting that his arm was shaking from either the terrible cold or the strain of climbing, or both. It was just 4:45.
Dale left the barn door open when he walked back to the house, half hoping that the hounds would jump him in the dark along the way, wanting to know that they were real. He gripped the long barrel of the useless flashlight so hard that his fingers cramped.
The deputy’s car was idling and the deputy was snoring in the front seat, his police radio cackling static audible even through the raised window glass. Dale left him sleeping and went into the house. It was still cold inside. He turned up the thermostat, heard the old furnace click in, and walked into the study. He had forgotten the computer.
>Hrot-garmr. Si-ik-wa UR.BAR.RA ki-sa-at. Wargus sit.
Dale rubbed his cheek, feeling the beard there. He was very tired, and his headache had grown worse rather than better. He found it difficult to focus his eyes on the screen. “Howling dog”—as if for fire. “He shall be a warg.” But what the hell was the middle part? After another moment of thought, during which he half dozed, Dale typed—
>What the hell is the middle part?
A moment later he snapped awake, realizing that he had dozed off in his chair while waiting for an answer. The screen never answers when I’m here. Aching everywhere, his head and lacerated scalp throbbing, Dale pulled himself out of the chair and walked out to the kitchen. He peered through the glass—the deputy was still there—and then locked the door and went back into the study.
>It is Hittite.
Dale sighed and rubbed his cheek again. He had to try twice before he could type out his next question without misspellings.
>What does it mean ?
This time he walked to the bathroom, holding himself upright with one palm against the wall as he urinated into the bowl. Flushing the toilet, washing his hands, staring at his pale and red-eyed image in the mirror, he felt as if he were observing and feeling everything through a waterfall of red pain. He walked back into the study.
>zi-ik-wa UR.BAR.RA ki-sa-at means “thou art become a wolf.”
Dale felt a surge of rage through the pain and fatigue. He was so fucking tired of games, he could throw up.
>Why the hell do you send me these messages in code if you’re just going to translate them for me?
Even before he had walked back from the kitchen, he knew he had wasted a question. This was absurd. The computer screen seemed to agree with him, since there was no reply. He hurriedly typed—
>Who has turned into a wolf? Me?
This time Dale walked to the head of the basement stairs and paused. Big band music was coming from the console radio down there. Hadn’t it been off when he and the deputies had been down there? Wishing that he still had his loaded shotgun but almost too tired to care about what was waiting for him, Dale went down the stairs.
The soft lamps near Duane’s old brass bed spilled soft yellow light onto the pillows. The wine crates and wooden shelves of paperbacks were reassuring in their familiar clutter. The furnace rattled and breathed with its usual sound. The radio dial glowed, and the old music played softly. Perhaps he had turned the radio on without thinking about it when he was down here. Or perhaps the station had been off the air for a while when the deputies were here with him. Who cared?
His legs felt leaden as he climbed the stairs and went back into the study.
>LU.MES hurkilas—the demon entities who are set to capture wolves and to strangle serpents.
“Well,” said Dale to the empty room, “thanks for nothing.” He switched off the ThinkPad and fell onto the daybed, still fully clothed, his muddy boots hanging over the edge. He was asleep before he thought to pull a blanket up over himself.
TWENTY-TWO
DURINGtheir last months together, before and after the late-spring blizzard that had snowed them in at the ranch, Clare and Dale had spoken—at first via banter but then more seriously—about being together. Clare had been accepted into an elite medieval studies graduate program at Princeton and would be leaving in July to meet some of the other anointed scholars there and prepare for the coming years. In June, Dale heard himself offer to join her there so that they could be together.