And the shutter closed, and the door barred, and no lamp lit besides the fire, and they waited.
It came at what Orin later reckoned was around midnight. There was no wind that night. There had been no wind all afternoon. The first sign of it was that the fire jumped. Not the flame.
The coals. The coals jumped in the hearth like something had knocked them from below. Pel went white. The old man did not move. Then there was a step on the porch.
One step, slow, deliberate. The board took the weight. Then there was another. And then there was a third. And it was at the door.
Then the door was struck, not knocked, struck. Once low down near the sill, hard enough that the bar in the brackets rattled and dust came down out of the roof. And a voice on the other side of the door said Pel's name in his wife's voice. Exactly. "Pel Ketaring," it said.
"Pel, come to the door." Pel was breathing so hard Orin could hear it. The old man reached over and put his hand on Pel's forearm and held it there. Nobody spoke.
The voice on the other side of the door said, "Pel, I walked up here. I walked up here to find you. Come to the door." Pel closed his eyes and did not speak.
The voice said Pel's name three more times, and the shape of the word changed each time, the way a thing says a word it has heard but does not understand. Then the voice was not his wife's voice anymore.
And then it was not any voice. And then it was, this is Orin's word, it was the sound the mule had made on the first night. And then it stopped. And then the door was struck again. And then very softly, the latch of the door was tried.
The latch was tried from the outside. Orin watched the latch move. It moved a little. It did not lift. And then it stopped.
And then all at once there was silence. And in the silence the old man began to speak. He spoke very quietly in a language Orin did not know and had never heard before and could not later place. And he spoke it for a long time. He spoke it steadily without pause in a voice that had no fear in it and no anger in it.
Just an old certainty. And whatever was on the other side of the door listened. Orin later swore to this. He said, "The thing on the other side of the door listened to that old man the way a man listens who has been spoken to by his rightful owner." And then the thing on the other side of the door walked off the porch.
It walked off slowly. It took the three steps down and it went out across the field. And they heard it go for a long time and then they did not hear it. And the old man kept talking in the low, steady voice for another hour after they had stopped hearing it. He kept talking until the fire had burned down to coals, and then he stopped, and he sat there in the chair, and he said nothing more until first light.
In the morning, he opened the door. The salt ring on the porch was scuffed on one side in a place about a foot in from the outer edge. Not broken, scuffed, like a foot had come down on the edge of it and then been pulled back. The old man looked at that scuff for a while, then covered it with fresh salt from a small horn and stood up.
He said, "You can go walk down the fork. It will let you now. Do not turn around, not once, not for a sound, not for a voice, not if you drop something; not once."
Pel said, "Sir, what do we owe you?" The old man looked at Pel for a long moment. He said, "A story you do not tell anybody who cannot use it, and one thing more."
Then he said, "Do not come back into this hollow, either of you, not to hunt, not to look, not on a bet. If you ever hear of any man from your county planning to hunt in Slate Fork Hollow, you tell them what happened to you; if they do not believe you, tell them what happened to me: I have lived here fifty years, kept the ring drawn every night of them, and have not been out of sight of this cabin after dark in forty of those years, and I will not be. Do you understand me?" Pel said, "Yes, sir."