Читать книгу Wolf Lake - John Verdon - Страница 7

PROLOGUE

She stood shivering in the moonlight between the two giant hemlocks at the end of the frozen lake. She couldn’t remember ever feeling so cold, so frightened. The sight of the full moon above the jagged treetops was giving her gooseflesh. The drooping branches were becoming in her mind deformed arms that might reach down and—

No! Stop! She shook her head—her real problem was terrifying enough without letting her imagination run wild.

In the distance she heard the motorcycle approaching—first on the old dirt road, then on the winding trail from the road down to the lake. The closer it came, the tighter the feeling in her chest.

Finally, with a surge of anxiety, she caught sight of the headlight flickering through the woods, then coming across the clearing that separated the pines from the towering black hemlocks.

He stopped in front of her and switched off the engine, planting his feet wide on the ground to balance the heavy bike—his big brother’s, which he rode illegally.

She could just make out a few snowflakes in his wind-tousled hair. She wasn’t sure whether he looked worried or whether she was imagining it because that was the way she’d expected him to look. Her phone call hadn’t been explicit, but she knew her voice had been full of fear and urgency. She was sure, even with his back to the moon, that he was looking at her intently, waiting for her to explain why they were meeting here.

She could hear him breathing, could even hear his heart beating. But that was impossible. Maybe it was her own heart, her own desperate pulse beating in her ears.

She’d prepared what she intended to say, rehearsed it a hundred times that very evening; but now, in this forbidding place, her voice failed her.

“What?” he asked. “What is it?” His voice was sharp, not like she’d ever heard it before.

She bit her lower lip, took a trembling breath, and forced out the words in a barely audible whisper.

She heard him take a deep breath, but he said nothing.

She wondered if he’d heard her—half hoping that he hadn’t.

A slow-moving cloud began to creep across the moon.

Sometime after that—she’d lost her sense of time—he restarted the motorcycle, gave the throttle a sudden twist, and accelerated out onto the ice-covered lake, the shriek of the engine slicing through the frigid air, the chrome tailpipe reflecting what was left of the moonlight.

Then, out on the distant center of the lake, the diminishing howl of the engine was broken by a horrifying crack—then another, and another, like a rapid series of muffled gunshots as the ice gave way under the motorcycle’s weight. There was a sickening splashing impact . . . the hiss of the hot machine sinking . . . and silence.

The cloud now had obliterated every trace of the moon.

All was darkness. No sound. No light. No thought. No hope. No feeling.

And then, the scream. The scream rising with a feral life of its own, going on and on.

The scream that she came to realize only later had been hers.