Stoneskin's Revenge Read Online Free PDF Page B

like somebody ramming their moving metal box right through the chainlink fence around the yard where he’d been playing with his friends—and smashing right on through to the other side, almost into the woods. And then there were those great big birds that had been flying around right after—the ones that had changed into men while he was looking right at ’em . They’d be enough to make anybody take leave of their senses and run off through the trees. Why, it made Forrest’s tail stop wagging every time he thought about ’em.
    Fortunately he was calmer now, and trying to figure, as best his canine mind allowed, how to get back home. So far he had narrowed his search to places where there were trees, because there’d been trees around the place he’d fled from. Unfortunately there were a lot of trees around; though often only in small patches. The only thing he was sure of was that he hadn’t crossed the big smooth-stone trail the metal boxes ran on, the one with the strip of grass captive in the middle. He’d have remembered crossing that because the one other time he’d run off he’d wound up there, and Master had just about worn him out with a switch when he found him.
    But if he hadn’t come upon it again, he was a puppy. Just to make sure, though, he poked his tan-and-white nose out of a stand of azaleas at the edge of somebody’s yard and trotted up a short, grassy hill. The sun was waiting for him there, reflecting back at him off a familiar hard white surface, and it brought those thick, bitter smells he identified with the metal boxes. Figured as much, he grumbled, and turned back.
    A short while later he found forest once more, dense with pine and poplar and maple, the underbrush mostly dogwood. For a while he sauntered along, nose to the ground; and as he ran, he gradually worked his way into older suburbs, threading between yards, along fence lines, ever alert for the right sort of cover.
    He caught something then: his own spoor undiluted. And he followed it, first uphill through a stand of pines, then through a thicket of blackberry briars, and finally to a veritable wall of woody debris overgrown with kudzu. He searched there until he found the place where he’d burst through in his terror; cautiously retraced his steps back inside…
    …and came into a tiny, grassy clearing completely encircled by trees—except on the side he’d entered from, where the kudzu made a sort of rampart. There were stones there, too: low, flat slabs of gray granite like Big Rock over to the right—the one with the carving on it—all pushing through the earth like bones wearing through a week-old kill.
    And there were more familiar odors: his own—and another that he recalled from long ago. An image swam into his mind: a black-haired boy kneeling before him, scratching his head, bringing him food, wrestling with him, throwing him sticks. And a series of sounds came with it: Calvin.
    But there were other human smells here as well: three of them—two male and one female, all young. Forrest found where someone had poured colored earth on the ground in a pattern that, when he traced it with his nose, proved to be a circle quartered by a cross. A fire had been built in the middle of it, and there were a lot of unfamiliar odors there: oils and blood and resins. There was also a bit of food about—or the wrappers it had come in: candy bars and chips and—and the wild-smelling stuff he’d tasted only once before: deer meat. He nosed up the morsel, swallowed it, though it was sun-dry and someone had burned it and rubbed vegetable stuff all over it. Not as juicy as the rabbits he loved to chase that Master sometimes took him long distances to pursue, but sufficient to a stomach that had not been properly tended for over a day.
    Something else caught his attention then: a slab of brown leather. A poke of his nose flopped it open, revealing bits of greenish-white paper with pictures on them. He took it in his mouth, ran a