Page 2 of My Halloween Hunter

The cold finds the back of my neck again.

"Is anyone living up the pass road?" I ask. "Between here and my car?"

Her eyes lift over the rims of her glasses and stay on me a beat too long. "Why?"

I open my mouth to tell her, and what comes out is, "No reason. Long day."

"Mm," Edna says. She walks me out to the porch and points at a dark shape against the darker trees.

Across the road someone has already set out a jack-o'-lantern, and its grin gutters in the cold.

"Lock your door, if you like," Edna says.

"If I like?"

But she's already gone back inside.

The cabin is one room and a loft, swept clean and smelling of years of woodsmoke, and it takes me three tries and most of my dignity to get the stove lit.

The window over the sink faces the forest. At night it's a black mirror, and the woman in it, me, is lit gold from behind, every inch of her on display to anything standing out in the pines.

I reach for the curtain, and my fingers close on the fabric. I linger, then I leave it open.

I wash one mug and dry it far more slowly than a mug needs, standing where the light is best, letting whatever is out there look.

My nipples tighten under my sweater, and a slow, heavy ache starts low in my belly. It's the idea of eyes on me from the dark — of being looked at and not knowing from where — and instead of sending me to the curtain, it makes me lean my hips against the counter and tip my face into the light.

Then something moves at the edge of the light.

It's there and gone, a pale shape low between two trunks that could be a face or could be birch bark, and I stand frozen with the mug in my hands and my pulse jumping in my throat. When I lean toward the glass, all I get back is my own reflection, wide-eyed and lit up like a lantern. That's the trouble with a lit window. Anyone outside can see in, and the only thing I can see is me.

I check my phone. No signal. I check it again, as though it might change its mind, and the whole time the ache between my legs is getting worse, not better, as if my body has heard the word danger and decided it means something else entirely.

At eleven I climb to the loft. The door stays unlocked, but I keep a chair at the door, just in case; I lie with the quilt pulled to my chin, not checking it, for a long time.

A footstep wakes me.

Frost crunches under real weight at the north wall, eight feet from my head with nothing but pine planks between us, and I'm awake all at once with my heart slamming and my fingers knotted in the quilt. The fire below has burned to orange. The loft is black.

Another step, slow and unhurried. Whoever it is isn't sneaking, because sneaking is for people who are afraid of being caught. The steps follow the wall to the corner, turn, and come down the east side toward the window with the firelight in it, and there they stop.

I stop breathing. I can imagine the shape of him through the wall — a big body standing perfectly still six feet from the glass, looking in at the place where I stood four hours ago.

My hand is between my legs. I don't remember putting it there. I'm wet. I can feel it through my leggings, soaked from nothing but the sound of his boots and the thought of him standing at the window where I stood, looking in at the place my body was. I press down hard with the heel of my hand, and a sound gets out of me, tiny, half a breath, and outside the stillness sharpens into something else entirely.

He heard.

I clap my other hand over my mouth and lie rigid, wet and shaking, while the footsteps start again: around the south wall, the west, the north, and around. And around. Four times, and on the fourth he comes up onto the porch, the step creaking under him, and the brass handle of my door turns in a slow quarter-turn, metal whispering against metal, testing the give.

Unlocked, and now he knows it.

The handle turns back. His steps go off into the trees, and I lie in the dark with my fingers still pressed against myself and my teeth sunk into the heel of my hand, and I don't sleep until the window goes grey.

In the morning the frost around the cabin is trampled to mud in a ring a foot wide.

On the east window, pressed into the frost on the outside of the glass at the height of my face, there's a handprint. It's enormous, the fingers spread wide, as if he leaned his whole weight on the window and stood there looking in at the room where I'd been. I put my own hand up against it from the inside, and my fingertips end somewhere around his second knuckle, and the cold comes through the glass into my palm.

Then I open the door, and on the porch rail, set down square where I can't possibly miss it, is my lens cap. The one I lost eleven kilometres up the mountain, in the dark, before I ever saw this valley.