Night Howl Read Online Free Page A

dream.”
    Sid looked at the print and then looked at his son.
    “It could have been one King made a while back, Bobby.”
    “It wasn’t. He made it last night.” Bobby said.
    Sid studied it some more. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll look for him tonight—or whatever dog it was.”
    “Good,” Bobby said. He wore a look of relief. He got up and ran back to the house. “Come on, Dad, let’s play Asteroids.”
    “Right,” Sid said. He stood up, but he couldn’t take his eyes from the paw print.
    When he looked up, he was sure it was going to rain. Answers. He had to have answers, and soon.

2
    I T WAS OBVIOUS to him that the old barn was no longer in use, even though it was still structurally sound. He thought of it as an ideal location, warm and secure. He could easily move in and out unobserved. His own observations told him that only the old man inhabited the farmhouse, an old man so set in his ways that it was possible to tell the time of day by his actions. He watched the old man in the morning, working on his small garden, taking meticulous care of the newly planted crops. Everything was growing straight and proper. The smallest weeds were plucked and removed. The earth was pampered, watered, and fed the proper nutritional chemicals. And the fence around the garden kept out the deer and the rabbits. He saw them standing nearby, looking longingly and hungrily at the old man’s plants, and he understood what the power of precaution, well-thought-out planning, could be. In a sense, the old man knew the future because he knew what would happen if he didn’t take steps to prevent it. This was the power of foresight. How powerful it could be.
    He had a healthy respect for these creatures. There was so much to learn from them, even though he had succeeded in outsmarting some of them. How simple his own kind appeared to be. When he had first comeupon the dog chained by the house, he had sat there listening to it bark that same, monotonous, empty sound, a mixture of fear and warning. After he grew tired of hearing it, he growled with an authority that it had never heard from anything other than a human. It astounded and confused the dog and then frightened it. It crawled back into its doghouse, whimpering. He had all he could do to get it to come out again and to trust him. But it did.
    It was dark. All the lights were out in the house. Nothing else moved. The dog came out to sniff in disbelief. It was easy to get to it, easy to make it understand and obey. All of its life, it had been a creature of commands. That was what it understood best. He got into its mind quickly, and because he understood the dog and its mind—and how that mind worked—better than any man could understand it, he could undo anything the men had taught it. The dog was to him what a child was to a grown man, and with the same ease that a grown man could exercise to influence a child, so he could influence this dog. It took him a while to train and retrain it to his satisfaction, but he was good at it. After all, he had been taught by the experts.
    All the while he remained cautious. He sensed that those who pursued him were always out there. So he kept hidden during the daytime, venturing out carefully to observe and study the surroundings and the inhabitants. He moved through shadows, sometimes crawling on his stomach when he heard voices or saw movement.
    After a short while, he got to know how many people lived in each of the half dozen houses on Lake Street. Plotting strategy, he recognized the need to center in on one at a time. All of this had the excitement and flavor of a hunt, only it was greater than any hunt he had ever undertaken. Chasing a rabbit wasfool’s play; he felt he could stalk a deer with his eyes closed. He was impatient with these traditional hunts and pursued them only when hunger demanded them. He wouldn’t, as some stray dogs would, feed out of garbage cans.
    He had come upon a stray dog here. The animal had come up