Page 1 of My Halloween Hunter

1

Darcy

The engine dies on the downgrade with a sound like someone letting out a breath. There's no shudder and no warning light, only the dash going dark and the wheel turning to lead in my hands as I coast onto a gravel shoulder, the pass road falling away below me into dusk.

I turn the key. Nothing happens, so I turn it again, harder, as though that has ever helped anyone in the history of cars.

"Okay." I pat the dash. "Rude."

I have a satellite messenger in the glovebox and maybe forty minutes of light. Down in the valley there's a scatter of yellow windows tucked between two mountain shoulders, close enough to walk to if I stop sitting here feeling sorry for myself.

I get my camera out before anything else, because that's how I'm built. The light up here is beautiful: late-October amber pouring through the pines like syrup, frost already feathering the ditch. I shoot the road curving into shadow, the ridge going black, and my own car sitting abandoned and faintly sheepish on the shoulder. Then I shoulder my pack and start down.

Somewhere in the first hundred metres the lens cap pops off and skitters into the dark at the road edge. I sweep my phone light over the gravel and find pine needles, frost and a beer can from a better decade, but no lens cap. I have two spares and my toes stopped reporting in a while ago, so I leave it.

When the road switches back, the valley opens beneath me: old growth running right to the edge of everything, a creek talking somewhere in the bottom, woodsmoke lying in a flat blue layer over a handful of roofs. My fingers itch for a tripod.

Twenty minutes down, the back of my neck goes cold.

It isn't a sound, at first. It's attention, the specific weight of being looked at, and it's coming from the trees on my left. When I slow, something in the treeline slows with me. When I stop to fix a strap that doesn't need fixing, the whole forest stops too, and the silence that follows has a shape to it, as if it's waiting for me to decide what happens next.

I know bears. I've spent twelve years shooting in bear country and I know the whole script: get big, get loud, don't run. But bears don't pace you, and elk don't hold a line two hundred yards off your shoulder for a quarter of an hour.

People do.

My mouth goes dry and my arms go cold from the shoulders down. The road narrows the way it does when my body decides it's in charge, everything at the edges going soft and unimportant.

I turn and look straight into the trees. Black trunks, the last amber caught between them, and nothing I can name.

I lift the camera anyway. My hands are shaking, but I brace against nothing and hold a slow shutter on the dark, and the click cracks through the cold like a snapped twig. On the screen there are pines and shadow and one trunk lit gold.

And under the fear, my body goes warm. It's low and heavy and pulled tight between my hips like a drawstring, and I stand in the middle of a mountain road with my heart slamming and my thighs pressed together, understanding nothing about myself at all.

I start walking again. Out in the trees, the attention starts walking too.

Somewhere in the next half mile, my steps get louder. I hear the change as it happens, weight dropping through my heels, gravel crunching out into the dark where anyone could follow it. I could stop.

I don't.

By the time I reach the valley floor, it's full dark. EDNA'S GENERAL is painted over the door in faded red, and the bell that rings when I shove inside is the best sound I've heard all year.

The woman behind the counter looks up from a paperback. She has a grey braid over one shoulder, reading glasses pushed up into her hair and a cardigan the colour of pumpkin soup, and she smiles at me like I'm late.

"There you are," she says, as if she was expecting me.

I glance back at the empty porch.

She sets the book face-down. "Pass road?"

"My car died out of nowhere. Is there a mechanic—"

"Ray's in Golden till Halloween." She's already reaching behind her for a brass key on a birch-wood tag, and she slides it across the counter. "Birch cabin. Firewood's on the porch, and the coffee maker's temperamental, but you look like you know how to sweet-talk things."

I haven't asked for a cabin.

"Halloween's a week away," I say.

"Seven days." Edna says it like seven days is a gift she picked out herself. "Creek trail's good for pictures if you wait till mid-morning. The light comes down through the old pines like it's looking for someone."