seen a dog like that,” Jake said. “Thing was half the size of the car.”
“Maybe it was a brown bear.”
“Maybe it wad Sasquadge,” Nancy said miserably.
We were all silent for a moment, letting that one land—and then we erupted into laughter. Nessie can hang it up. Cryptozoology never came up with a cuter beast than Sasquadge.
Two poles with reflective disks attached to them marked the one-lane dirt road that led to my parents’ summer cottage, which sat on the estuarial pool known as Maggie Pond. Jake turned in and rolled down his window at the same time, letting in a warm slipstream of salty air that blew his hair back from his forehead.
The lane was cratered with potholes, some of them a foot deep and a yard across, and Jake had to slow to about ten miles an hour. Weeds hissed against the undercarriage. Rocks pinged.
We had gone a third of a mile when we saw the branch, a big oak bough across the road. Jake cursed, banged the car into park.
“I god it,” Nancy said.
“You stay here,” Jake said, but she was already throwing the passenger door open.
“I need to stredge my leds,” she said, and tossed the bloody Floyd shirt on the floor of the car as she slammed the door.
We watched her walk into Jake’s headlights: cute, fragile little thing in pink sneakers. She hunched at one end of the broken branch, where the splintered, reddish wood shone bright and clean, and she began to tug.
“She ain’t gonna be able to move that alone,” Jake said.
“She’s got it,” Geri told him.
“Go help her, Paul,” Jake said to me. “It’ll make up for you being such a douche a couple minutes ago.”
“Oh, shit, man, I wasn’t even thinking. . . . I didn’t mean to . . .” I said, my head sinking between my shoulders under the weight of my shame.
Out in the road, Nancy managed to turn the eight-foot branch most of the way to one side. She went around to grab the other end, perhaps to try rolling it out of the road and into the ditch.
“Couldn’t you just’ve stuck that fifty under the seat? Nan ain’t gonna sleep tonight now. You know she’s going to cry her head off as soon as we’re alone,” Jake said. “And I’m going to be the one who has to deal with it—”
“What’s that?” Geri said.
“—not you,” Jake went on, as if she hadn’t spoken. “You pulled your same old Paul Whitestone magic. You took a good evening, and abra-fuckin’-cadabra—”
“Do you hear that?” Geri asked again.
I felt it before I heard it. The car shook. I became aware of a sound like an approaching storm front, rain drumming heavily on the earth. It was like being parked alongside a railroad track as a freight train thundered past.
The first of the horses thundered past on the left, so close that one shoulder brushed the driver’s-side mirror. Nancy looked up and let go of the branch and made a move like she was going to jump out of the road. She only had a moment, maybe a second or two, and she didn’t get far. The horse rode her down, hooves flashing, and Nancy fell beneath them. She was prone in the road when the next horse went over her. I heard her spine crack. Or maybe that was the big tree branch, I don’t know.
A third horse flashed past, and a fourth. The first three horses kept going, disappearing past the headlights, into the darkness. The fourth slowed close to Nancy’s body. She’d been half dragged and half thrown almost thirty feet from the Corvette, right to the far edge of what the headlights could reveal. The tall white horse lowered its head and seemed to gum Nancy’s hair, which was bloody and matted and twitching in the breeze.
Jake screamed. I think he was trying to scream Nancy’s name but wasn’t able to articulate words. Geri was screaming, too. I wasn’t. I couldn’t get the breath. I felt as if a horse had run over me also, stamped all the air out of me.
The horse that stood over Nancy had a mangled face, one side pink and flayed as the result of a long-ago burn. Both of its eyes were white, but the one on the ruined side of its head bulged sickeningly from its socket. The tongue that slipped out and lapped Nancy’s face wasn’t a horse tongue at all. It was as thin and black as a