The goodbyes on the Smiths' wide, welcoming porch were just a little too bright, a little too hurried, the words tumbling out like stones meant to fill a deepening well. Barbara hugged Trisha tightly, her grip fierce and sudden, a brief, almost desperate compression before she let go.
"You all get home safe now, you hear?" Charles said, his voice a low, gravelly rumble as he shook George's hand. His eyes, however, were not on them but were scanning the dark street beyond the halo of their porch light. The warm, jovial grill-master persona had been packed away with the leftover potato salad, replaced by a watchful, coiled tension that made the hairs on George's arms stand up.
"We will. Thanks again, it was a wonderful night," George said, the words feeling hollow and inadequate against the sudden, strange curtain that had fallen over the evening.
They turned and started down the crushed shell path, the cheerful golden glow of the Smith house at their backs. The crunch of the shells under their feet was absurdly loud. The second they passed the white picket fence gate and stepped onto the asphalt of the street, the world changed.
The first thing they noticed was the sound. Or rather, the lack of it.
The party's laughter and music and the clatter of a dozen conversations had been a brilliant, warm bubble of light and noise. Now that it had popped, the silence that rushed in to replace it was absolute. It was a thick, heavy, suffocating quiet, deeper and more profound than any natural night silence they had ever experienced. It was the silence of a vacuum, of a world consciously holding its breath. There was no rustle of leaves in the gentle ocean breeze, no chirp of crickets, no distant hum of a generator. It was a dead, woolen quiet that pressed against their eardrums.
Then, cutting through that impossible silence, came another sound.
Dogs.
Not the friendly, scattered barks of a normal evening, but a rising chorus of frantic, terrified howling. It came from every direction at once, from behind the closed doors of the houses they passed, from somewhere deep in the surrounding woods, a dissonant symphony of canine fear that seemed to vibrate through the very pavement beneath their feet. It was a sound of pure, unadulterated alarm, the kind a dog makes when it senses something fundamentally wrong in the world.
"Jesus," George muttered, instinctively moving closer to Trisha and putting a protective arm around Amelia, who flinched at a particularly piercing howl from somewhere nearby. "What the hell is that?"
"It's the dogs," Trisha whispered, her voice hushed, as if speaking too loudly might shatter something fragile and dangerous. "They weren't doing that before. They weren't doing that an hour ago."
Mike pressed himself against his father's leg, his eyes wide, not with the wonder he'd had at the party, but with a primal fear. He couldn't hear the barks, but he could feel the vibrations through the ground, could see the tension in his family's postures, could feel the wrongness in the air.
They continued walking, their footsteps too loud in the stifling quiet between the waves of barking. The houses they passed were not just quiet; they were dark. Not a single television flickered behind a window. Not one lamp was lit in a living room. Every home was a shuttered, black eye. As they walked, they heard it—the distinct, solid thunk of a deadbolt being thrown home from inside a house to their left. Then, from across the street, the soft, precise click of a heavy lock.
"Did you hear that?" Amelia's voice was a high, thin thread of anxiety. "They're locking their doors."
"It's late, Ames," George said, trying to force a normality into his tone that he absolutely did not feel. His doctor's mind was racing, trying to find a rational explanation—a bear sighting, a coyote pack, a town-wide drill he hadn't been told about. None of it fit.
"It's not that late," Trisha countered, her journalist's instincts overriding her fear for a moment. "And they were all just at a party. They didn't seem tired. They seemed… scared."
The dread was a physical presence now, a cold mist that coiled around their ankles and climbed their spines. The air itself felt different—heavier, colder, charged with a static electricity that made the skin on the back of George's neck prickle. It was a feeling of something off, something wrong, something alien that had draped itself over the familiar streets of Eastport.
They were two blocks from their own apartment, cutting through a small intersection, when they saw him.
A man was standing perfectly still at the far corner, half-shrouded in the deep shadow between two streetlights. He wasn't walking a dog. He wasn't taking out the trash. He was just… standing. Facing them. His posture was ramrod straight, his arms held stiffly at his sides.
"Who's that?" Amelia whispered, shrinking back.
George squinted, his heart hammering against his ribs. The figure was eerily motionless. "Hello?" George called out, his voice sounding brash and foolish in the consuming quiet. The barking seemed to intensify for a moment, as if in response.
The figure did not respond. He didn't move a muscle.
"Hey!" George called again, a little louder, taking a tentative step forward. "Everything alright?"
For a long, heart-stopping moment, nothing happened. Then, as if a switch had been flipped, the man turned. The movement was not slow and casual. It was a single, rigid, mechanical motion, like a soldier executing a precise maneuver. He turned his back to them and began to walk away, his footsteps unnaturally even and measured on the pavement, fading quickly as he moved down the dark side street.
"What was that?" George breathed, a cold knot tightening in his stomach.
Trisha was staring after the vanished figure, her face pale in the dim light. Her hand was clutching George's arm, her nails digging into his sleeve. "I know him," she said, her voice barely audible. "I was just talking to Barbara about the town's history. She pointed him out. That's Elias Green. He lives by himself in a little cabin near the lake, at the very foot of the forest. She said he's lived there alone for thirty years. Keeps to himself. She said he's… harmless."
The way she said "harmless" hung in the air, contradicting everything they had just witnessed.
The walk home the final block was made in a terrified silence. They no longer heard locks clicking; every door was already sealed tight. The barking continued its frantic chorus, a sound of panic that was now the only thing keeping the oppressive, waiting silence at bay. They felt exposed, naked under the vast, star-dusted sky, as if a thousand unseen eyes were watching them from the darkened windows.
When they finally reached the blue door next to the Chronicle office, George fumbled with the keys, his hands unsteady. The lock turned with a sound that seemed to echo for blocks. They practically fell inside, stumbling up the dark staircase, and George slammed the apartment door behind them, throwing the deadbolt and engaging the chain with a series of sharp, final cracks.
They stood in the dark of their own living room, breathing heavily, listening. The frantic barking was muffled here, but still audible. A constant, desperate reminder of the wrongness outside.
No one spoke. There was nothing to say. The wonderful, welcoming party felt like a dream that had curdled into a nightmare. The quaint, peaceful town of Eastport was gone, and in its place was something else entirely—a place that held its breath and locked its doors, a place where lonely men stood watch in the dark, a place where the night belonged to the dogs, and to whatever it was they were howling at.
George went to the window and looked down at the empty, silent street. It was 11:05. The town was a graveyard.
He pulled the curtains shut, but the feeling of being watched remained.