Fear Nothing

realized that Orson had stopped whining, I turned toward him and discovered he was gone.
        I thought he must have chased after something in the night, though it was remarkable that he had sprinted off so soundlessly. Anxiously moving back the way I had come, across the porch toward the steps, I couldn't see the dog anywhere out there among the moonlit dunes.
        Then I found him at the open front door, peering out warily. He had retreated into the living room, just inside the threshold. His ears were flattened against his skull. His head was lowered. His hackles bristled as if he had sustained an electrical shock. He was neither growling nor whining, but tremors passed through his flanks.
        Orson is many things - not least of all, strange - but he is not cowardly or stupid. Whatever he was retreating from must have been worthy of his fear.
        “What's the problem, pal?”
        Failing to acknowledge me with even as little as a quick glance, the dog continued to obsess on the barren landscape beyond the porch. Although he drew his black lips away from his teeth, no snarl came from him. Clearly he no longer harbored any aggressive intent; rather, his bared teeth appeared to express extreme distaste, repulsion.
        As I turned to scan the night, I glimpsed movement from the corner of my eye: the fuzzy impression of a man running in a half crouch, passing the cottage from east to west, progressing swiftly with long fluid strides through the last rank of dunes that marked the to of the slope to the beach, about forty feet away from me.
        I swung around, bringing up the Glock. The running man had either gone to ground or had been a phantom.
        Briefly I wondered if it was Pinn. No. Orson would not have been fearful of Jesse Pinn or of any man like him.
        I crossed the porch, descended the three wooden steps, and stood in the sand, taking a closer look at the surrounding dunes.
        Scattered sprays of tall grass undulated in the breeze. Some of the shore lights shimmered across the lapping waters of the bay. Nothing else moved.
        Like a tattered bandage unraveling from the dry white face of a mummified pharaoh, a long narrow cloud wound away from the chin of the moon.
        Perhaps the running man was merely a cloud shadow. Perhaps. But I didn't think so.
        I glanced back toward the open door of the cottage. Orson had retreated farther from the threshold, deeper into the front room. For once, he was not at home in the night.
        I didn't feel entirely at home, either.
        Stars. Moon. Sand. Grass. And a feeling of being watched.
        From the slope that dropped to the beach or from a shallow swale between dunes, through a screen of grass, someone was watching me. A gaze can have weight, and this one was coming at me like a series of waves, not like slow surf but like fully macking double overheads, hammering at me.
        Now the dog wasn't the only one whose hackles rose.
        Just when I began to worry that Bobby was taking a mortally long time, he appeared around the east end of the cottage. As he approached, sand pluming around his bare feet, he never looked at me but let his gaze travel ceaselessly from dune to dune.
        I said, “Orson haired out.”
        “Don't believe it,” Bobby said.
        “Totally haired out. He's never done that before. He's pure guts, that dog.”
        “Well, if he did,” Bobby said, “I don't blame him. Almost haired out myself.”
        “Someone's out there.”
        “More than one.”
        “Who?”
        Bobby didn't reply. He adjusted his grip on the shotgun but continued to hold it at the ready while he studied the surrounding night.
        “They've been here before,” I guessed.
        “Yeah.
        “Why? What do they want?”
        “I don't know.”
        “Who are they?” I asked again.
        As before, he didn't answer.
        “Bobby?” I pressed.
        A great pale mass, a few hundred feet high, gradually resolved out of the darkness over the ocean to the west: A fog bank, revealed in lunar whitewash, extended far to the north and the south. Whether it came to land or hung offshore all night, the fog pushed a quieting pressure ahead of it. On silent wings, a formation of pelicans flew low over the peninsula and vanished across the black waters of the bay. As the remaining onshore breeze faded, the long grass drooped and was still, and I