Trick or Breed

HE NEVER RUNS. HE DOESN'T HAVE TO.

Meg has brought her five best friends home to her dad's lake resort in the Ozarks for Halloween week.

Troy is forty-eight, six and a half feet tall, a cave guide by day, and the undefeated champion of the family prank war. He is also very big. All over.

On the first night, once Meg's gone to bed, he tells her friends the lake version of the local legend. A man in work coveralls and a mule's-face mask walks up out of the drowned town every October with his zipper open and nothing underneath. He never runs. He won't come through a lit door. He only takes a girl who stops running, and the girl he takes is ruined for other men and sick by breakfast.

At midnight the dock bell rings.

They all run. None of them runs very fast.

Imani is skinny-dipping off the dock. Court is out on a foggy trail. Vivian is in the basement when the fuse blows. Yesenia, who has never been with anyone, is sitting in her grandmother's dead sedan. And Natalie, a labor nurse, swears she knows where every exit is.

They stop running, one at a time, and the masked man fills them up.

By breakfast they're limping, glowing, throwing up off the dock, and insisting nothing happened.

Meg is the one woman on the lake he won't touch. Her dad has kept the family trophy, a stuffed bass called Delbert, every year since she was ten. This year she's bought floodlights.

Her friends keep switching them off.