The Thing at Bainter Farm

The Bainter place sits a quarter mile off the gravel, white clapboard, built from a 1923 Sears Modern Home catalog. The kind of house that was delivered on a railcar in 30,000 pieces and raised by hand. It's survived a hundred South Dakota winters and it'll survive a hundred more.

Trevor and Iyoko are watching Wheel of Fortune reruns when Harley starts up.

"That damn dog," Trevor says, not looking up from Vanna. Harley's a Shepherd mix, eighty pounds of neurotic energy, and he barks at everything. Coyotes. The mailman. His own shadow on a clear night.

Then Koda joins in. And that's different.

Koda is a Shepherd mix who doesn't bark at anything. Koda has seen coyotes trot through the yard and didn't bother getting up. Koda once watched a rattlesnake cross the porch and just looked at it.

Koda is barking.

Trevor steps onto the porch with a Maglite the size of a baseball bat. Both dogs are at the railing, hackles up, aimed at the tree line two hundred yards out. Nothing moves. The beam cuts through the dark and finds nothing but dead grass and snow.

"There's nothing out there," he tells them.

The dogs disagree.

Iyoko can't sleep. The barking hasn't stopped. Not once. Not a pause, not a break, not even the usual cycle where they wind down and forget what they were mad about. Continuous, desperate, hoarse barking aimed at the same patch of darkness north of the house.

"Trevor. Trevor, something's wrong with them."

"It's a coyote."

"Koda doesn't bark at coyotes."

Trevor doesn't have an answer for that.

Trevor goes out again. Boots, Carhartt, the .30-06 because why not. The dogs won't come with him. He's never seen that before. Harley, who chases everything, won't leave the porch. Just stands there barking into the dark like he's trying to keep it from coming closer.

Trevor walks fifty yards toward the tree line. The snow crunches under his boots. He stops.

There are tracks.

They're wrong. They look like boot prints at first, but the stride is too long and they're barefoot. In February. In South Dakota. And halfway across the field they change — the toes spread wider, the heel narrows, like whatever was walking forgot how feet work.

The tracks lead to within forty yards of the house. Then they stop. Then they go back toward the trees.

Then they stop being tracks at all.

Trevor is back inside. Doors locked. He hasn't locked the doors in thirty years of living here. There's nothing to lock them against. The nearest neighbor is four miles east.

"What was out there?" Iyoko asks from the bedroom doorway.

"I don't know."

"The dogs—"

"I know."

The dogs are still barking.

Harley goes quiet first. Not gradually — all at once. Like a switch. Koda keeps going for another ten minutes, then he stops too. The silence is worse than the barking.

Trevor looks out the window. Both dogs are on the porch, pressed against the front door, whining.

They're not looking at the tree line anymore.

They're looking at the barn.

Morning. Gray light. Trevor hasn't slept. He walks to the barn with the rifle because the horses need feeding and he's not the kind of man who doesn't feed his horses.

The barn door is open. He closed it last night. He always closes it.

Inside, the horses are in their stalls. They're calm. Too calm. They don't look at him when he comes in. They're looking at the far corner of the barn where the hay bales are stacked.

There's something behind the hay.

It's not moving. It might be a person. It has the shape of a person. But the proportions are slightly off — the arms are a little too long, the shoulders a little too narrow, and it's perfectly still in a way that living things aren't.

Trevor raises the rifle.

"Hey."

Nothing.

"Hey, you need to come out of there."

It tilts its head. Not like a person turns to look at you. Like a dog hearing a new sound. Forty-five degrees. Too far.

When Iyoko calls the sheriff, she can't explain what Trevor saw in the barn because Trevor can't explain it either. By the time Deputy Reeves drives the fourteen miles from town, there's nothing in the barn but hay and horse shit and a smell Reeves can't identify but will think about for years.

The tracks in the snow lead from the tree line to the barn. From the barn, they lead north across the pasture toward the creek.

After the creek, there are no tracks.

Harley and Koda sleep inside now. Trevor doesn't argue about it anymore.

Some nights, around 3 AM, Koda lifts his head and stares at the north-facing window. He doesn't bark. He just watches.

That's worse.