THREE THE MINE ROAD
Gerald Holt should have gone home after his New Year’s ride.
Instead, he smelled blood near Mesa Edge and stopped his bicycle in the road.
He saw Kyle hanging from the sign. He saw the dark store windows. Then he saw the figure on the ridge above the station.
It was tall, gray, and thin enough to be mistaken for a dead tree. Its elbows bent backward. Its face was smooth except for a mouth that opened too wide.
Gerald dropped his bike and ran.
The thing moved after him with a three-beat gait: scrape, scrape, slide.
He made the Halloway fence and climbed badly, tearing his hand on the wire. Horses were already running the pasture. Their eyes rolled white in the moonlight.
Gerald reached the middle of the field before the cold hand closed around his arm.
It did not drag him toward the mine right away. First it spoke in his wife’s voice.
“Jerry,” it said. “Help me.”
His wife had been dead eleven years.
Gerald looked back.
That was enough.
The creature hauled him uphill. His heels carved twin lines through the dry grass. At the mine mouth, he caught one last view of the road, his bicycle tipped on its side beneath the moon.
Then darkness folded over him.
Tomas, Arlo, and Cawley found the bicycle twenty minutes later. Cawley wanted to go after the man.
“You hear somebody call your name in there,” Tomas said, “you keep walking. You see somebody you love, you keep walking. You feel a hand on your shoulder, you do not turn around.”
Cawley spat into the dirt. “That man may still be alive.”
“He may,” Tomas said. “But the thing that brings him back will not be.”
They left the road and followed the mine track on foot.