Hemlock Bay

soon. Where were these ghouls?
    He heard something, something that was different from the mad human voices, like a high whine, sort of a hissing sound that didn’t belong here, maybe didn’t belong anywhere. He felt gooseflesh rise on his arms. He felt a shock of cold. He was on the point of leaping out when, to his utter astonishment, the huge front barn doors whooshed inward, blinding light flooded in, and in the middle of that light were dust devils that looked like small tornadoes. The white light faded away, and the dust devils looked more like two whirling, white cones, distinct from each other, spinning and twisting, riding up then dipping down, blending together, then separating—no, no, they were just dust devils, still white because they hadn’t sucked up the dirt yet from the barn floor. But what was that sound he heard? Something strange, something he couldn’t identify. Laughter? No, that was crazy, but that was what registered in his brain.
    The boys saw the dust devils, whirling and spinning far above them, and started screaming. Rob jumped up, grabbed his older brother, and managed to jerk him out of the circle.
    Tammy Tuttle, who’d been looking up, turned suddenly, raised her knife, and yelled, “Get back down, Little Bloods! Don’t you dare anger the Ghouls. Get back in the circle, now! GET BACK DOWN!”
    The boys scrabbled farther away from the circle. Tommy Tuttle was on them in an instant, jerking them back. Tammy Tuttle drew the knife back, aiming toward Donny Arthur, as Savich leaped up from behind the bale of hay and fired. The bullet ripped into her arm at her shoulder. She screamed and fell onto her side, the knife flying out of her hand.
    Tommy Tuttle whipped about, no knife in his hand now but a gun, and that gun was aimed not at Savich but at the boys. The boys were screaming as Savich shot Tommy through the center of his forehead.
    Tammy Tuttle was moaning on the floor, holding her arm. The boys stood, clutched together, silent now, and all three of them looked up toward those whirling, white cones that danced up and down in the clear light coming through the barn doors. No, not dust devils, two separate things.
    One of the boys whispered, “What are they?”
    “I don’t know, Rob,” Savich said and pulled the boys toward him, protecting them as best he could. “Just some sort of weird tornado, that’s all.”
    Tammy was yelling curses at Savich as she tried to pull herself up. She fell back. There was a shriek, loud and hollow. One of the cones seemed to leap forward, directly at them. Savich didn’t think, just shot it, clean through. It was like shooting through fog. The cone danced upward, then twisted back toward the other cone. They hovered an instant, spinning madly, and in the next instant, they were gone. Simply gone.
    Savich grabbed both boys against him again. “It’s all right now, Donny, Rob. You’re both all right. I’m very proud of you, and your parents will be, too. Yes, it’s okay to be afraid; I know I’m scared out of my mind, too. Just stay nice and safe against me. That’s it. You’re safe now.”
    The boys were pressed so tightly against him that Savich could feel their hearts pounding as they sobbed, deep, ragged sobs, and he knew there was blessed relief in their sobs, that they finally believed they were going to survive. They clutched at him and he held them as tightly as he could, whispering, “It will be all right. You’re going to be home in no time at all. It’s okay, Rob, Donny.”
    He kept them both shielded from Tammy Tuttle, who was no longer moaning. He made no move to see what shape she was in.
    “The Ghouls,” one of the boys kept saying over and over, his young voice cracking. “They told us all about what the Ghouls did to all the other boys—ate them up whole or if they were already full, then they just tore them up, chewed on their bones—”
    “I know, I know,” Savich said, but he had no idea what his eyes had seen, not really. Whirling dust devils, that was all. There were no hidden axes or knives. Unless they somehow morphed into something more substantial? No, that was crazy. He felt something catch inside him. It was a sense of what was real, what had to be real. It demanded he reject what he’d seen, bury it under a hundred tons of earth, make the Ghouls gone forever, make it so they had never existed. It must have been some kind of natural phenomenon, easily explained, or some kind of an illusion, a