The sign at the county line had been bullet-riddled for twenty years: WELCOME TO PACKER’S CORNER. POP. 312. Now it was just a ragged metal ghost, like everything else in his memory.

The thing in the chair had his father’s plaid shirt, the one with the torn pocket where he used to keep his Skoal. It had his father’s hands—knuckles like walnuts, the left pinkie bent sideways from a long-ago fight with a hay baler. But the face was wrong. The face was a smooth, gray expanse of skin where features should have been. No eyes. No mouth. Just two small slits where a nose might have been, flaring slightly with each of the house’s breaths. He-s Out There

The thing pointed through the shattered window, toward the tree line. The woods were blacker than the sky, blacker than anything Sam had ever seen. They pulsed like a heartbeat. The sign at the county line had been

The front door was unlocked. That should have been his first warning. Now it was just a ragged metal ghost,

Behind him, the thing in the chair began to hum—an old song, one his father used to whistle while he worked. The one about the long black veil.

The flashlight flickered once, twice, and died.

It wasn’t his father.