“He never heard the dogs, but what pressed at his back was a communal terror, passed down from one person to the next until it had infiltrated childhood dreams. A force so unreasonable, so all- encompassing that there was no true escape from it. When he woke with his back to a tree, he sensed that he wasn’t alone and hadn’t been for some time. It was difficult to tell whether the presence was a projection of his dreams or something more real, something wearing the dark mantle of night, made of muscle and bone. He ran again.”
