[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

They searched for the means of opening the door for an entire day, but there seemed to be nothing in the way of a latch or hidden control, no sign of a lock or an opening for a key. Eventually, they found a place in the rock face, near one side of the door, in which the otherwise relatively smooth rock contained a 'handhold', a place where someone had subtly cut out a piece of the stone to leave an opening well-suited for a human hand to grip and pull.

The only problem was that the stone 'door' was far too massive for any human to ever move by such a method. Even a professional weightlifter or the like would have been unable to move the massive stone slab in any way. Conners doubted that a horse or an ox could do much to pull such a mass.

Bringing in machinery to move the door would be difficult, because the cliff face was surrounded by thick forest, with no access road or the like anywhere close, and they hoped to avoid drawing any more attention to the site than they could possibly help.. The matter was already too complicated and public for comfort, so cutting a path through the woods seemed unwise and too time consuming an option to be considered.

Also, they had no idea what was on the other side, and if they did force the door, whoever, or whatever, it was that had passed through would surely know and they might well lose any track of their quarry.

Instead, after a conference, McLaird, Conners, and Bingham decided to ‘stake out’ the site with their best woods-wise men, and see what developed. They did their best to avoid leaving any trace of their presence, and set up ‘blinds’ from which the location could be watched. For the sake of safety, they made a point of having at least two men from each group on site at all times, well-armed and ready for trouble, if trouble there was to be.

Then came the report of yet another 'monster encounter', this time from a pair of local young people, who had been near the river fishing, on the north side of the river, when they saw what they described as a tall, 'very oddly proportioned' figure walking along the far bank of the river, the same side as Harrystown. They had only realized how tall the figure was when they saw him walk past a tree they knew about, and then they realized that it had to be 'over seven feet tall', and built very heavily, and 'wearing some kind of fur coat all over' and walking with a strange, 'hunched over' gait.

The boys had not reported this until the following morning, and by good fortune the Aces and B-Jones men were among the first to get word of it, so they arrived at the river site in time to discover a good set of tracks in the soft muddy ground near the river bank. The tracks did indeed match what would be expected if they were made by a humanoid figure with a height of about two meters.

The tracks were vaguely human-like, but not definitely not human. The footprints were definitely those of a biped, though. The foot proportions were wrong, too long, too wide, with deep impressions as if they were heavily clawed. As one Ace commented, if a bear could walk like a human for a long period, with a nearly human gait, the tracks might have looked something like what they had found.

The tracks ran from west-to-east, as if whatever had made them was walking along the river toward Harrystown. They followed the tracks as far as they could, but half a kilometer outside Harrystown the tracks turned away from the river, and up into hard rocky ground. From there the trail was lost.

They did not have a solid time on the sighting, all the boys who had been fishing remembered was that it had been sometime well after the Moon had risen, but before the latest wave of thick clouds had obscured the Moon. They had seen the figure by moonlight, after all. The Moon had risen roughly at two in the morning, which meant that the sighting had occurred sometime after roughly two in the morning, but before about five-thirty.

That gave them a three and a half hour time window. Which became especially interesting later in the morning, when news came of yet another cemetery desecration.

MORE LATER.