Wild Fell Read Online Free PDF Page B

with her knuckles like a crying child in a cartoon.
Sean let the fire go out
, she thought stupidly.
How did the fire go out that quickly? It’s only been a couple of minutes. We just dozed off.
    “Sean . . .”
    For a moment, Brenda thought she had gone blind, because she couldn’t see anything: not the fire, not the lake, not the trees, not the sky. The world as she had known it before she dozed off had simply . . . vanished. She might have woken up in the blackness of space. She knew, without being able to see, that he was not beside her. Brenda felt around with her hands. The blanket had fallen off her shoulders and was gathered around her waist. Her fingers located the pile of clothes next to the fire. She found her sweater and pulled it over her head. It felt damp and slimy against her cold skin, and she felt her waking confusion and disorientation give way to the first stirrings of genuine fear.
    She whipped her head around.
Someone is there. I can feel it.
Someone is watching me.
This time, Brenda didn’t call out Sean’s name: she whispered it, suddenly, crazily afraid that if he wasn’t close enough to hear her whisper, someone or something else might answer her from the darkness instead of him.
    As her eyes grew accustomed to the dark, Brenda realized that the shoreline of Devil’s Lake was enveloped in deep fog, the densest fog she had ever seen in all of her sixteen years growing up in Alvina. Sure, there had been fogs before, certainly the sort of mists anyone living near large bodies of water knows well. They came, they went. At worst they were an annoyance for boaters and drivers on roads, especially at night. But this? She had never seen anything like this.
    And how much time had passed? Half an hour? An hour? Two?
    Brenda looked up and, for a moment, thought she saw stars in the sky through the ceiling of fog. They comforted her, orienting her in relation to a world she knew instead of this murky alien landscape. She ticked off a mental checklist.
Stars are up, the ground is down. Lake is in front of us, car is behind us. Good, good. I know where I am. But where’s Sean?
She looked up again, but the stars had vanished and she was in darkness again, damp darkness that felt like the breath of a large predator with infinite patience.
    And she felt the eyes again, just out of sight.
    The Devil is always a thief, Brenda.
    Unbidden, an image eddied in her mind. It was the image from Sean’s stupid ghost story about the woman with no eyes who rushed across the road from behind the locked gate of the desolate country cemetery.
    This time not caring who heard her, Brenda screamed out, “
Sean! Sean, where are you?
” but her voice was lost in the deadening weight of the heavy fog. The dullness of it mocked her, isolating her with its brutal, forced quieting. She felt her rising fear flip over into the terror zone before she was even able to understand why it had. Brenda started to cry. Had she been further away from the edge of hysteria, she might have wondered why the thought that perhaps Sean was playing a trick on her, or hiding, or going to the bathroom up against a tree hadn’t even occurred to her as an outside possibility, a logical conclusion at which to arrive in these circumstances.
    No, Brenda knew two things clearly, internally, on a primal level that did not require external verification. Firstly, she knew Sean was nowhere nearby. She sensed he wasn’t hiding, playing a trick, or anything else. He was simply
not there
. His presence had been
cancelled
. Brenda’s conscious mind may not have been able to ride that particular horse but her subconscious mind had already processed it. Secondly, she knew just as strongly that she wasn’t alone, that whatever she felt peering at her through the fog wasn’t Sean.
    Brenda groped on the ground at her feet till she found her pedal pushers and her sandals. She dressed herself blindly, frantically, feeling for buttons and zippers. She knew her