It was one of those days when nothing went right. It was the kind of day that started badly, and then got worse.

Wes Bradley was thinking about this as he dug the hole on the side of the road just beyond the tree line. If he had slept better and not tossed and turned all night worrying about his stock portfolio, he wouldn't have awoken cranky and out of sorts. Then maybe he wouldn't have fumbled with the coffee pot so badly that it slipped out of his hands and broke on the kitchen floor. Then he wouldn't have cut his foot on one of the shards, fallen over against the table and inadvertently knocked his wife's antique fruit bowl onto the floor, which broke as well. Then she wouldn't have started screaming at him. Then he wouldn't have gotten into his car a nervous wreck. Then he wouldn't have been driving so fast through the dense ground fog that oozed through the forest trees, blanketing the country road.

And then he wouldn't have hit the old woman.

He hadn't even been sure he'd done it when it happened. There was a brief glimpse of a figure in front of the car then a thump about as jarring as if he hit a pothole in the road. If he'd only blinked, he thought, digging, he would never have known it had happened at all. Then he wouldn't have stopped and gone back to search. And nobody – including him – would have known what happened. And now he wouldn't be digging this hole.

But he had seen the figure, shadowy and thin, just before he felt the thump of the car striking it. And he had stopped, gotten out, gone back to look, and found the old lady.

Old, in fact, was almost too kind of a word. She was ancient. Her hair – what little there was of it – was pure white and her skin was stretched like parchment over her frail bones. That the impact had killed her instantly was a certainty. She felt exactly like the trash bag filled with the pieces of the broken coffee pot and fruit bowl when he lifted her up off the road and carried her into the trees. He had no idea who she was or where she had come from, having never seen her or anyone like her before. Not many people lived in the rural area, which was how the residents liked it. And since most of them had enough money to afford the large forested estates, neighbors were few and far between.

Still, Wes knew, or had at least seen all of them at the country club, which was why he was certain that the old lady didn't belong there. Her clothing was far too ragged for her to have been someone's aging relative, and she was far too ancient to be on anyone's housekeeping staff. Still, there were stories of squatters who evaded the eyes of the residents and all of their private security patrols and lived in hollows deep within the woods. And there were also the rumors of witches who held secret rituals far from prying eyes deep within the thick trees where no one ever went. Wes always believed these were just spook stories meant to frighten children on camping trips or at Halloween.

But now, digging the hole by the side of the road, he wasn't so sure.

There was something about the old lady that definitely wasn't right. It wasn't just that her skin gave off a powdery residue as if it were turning to dust before his very eyes. And it wasn't just that she was more fragile that she should have been, even at her age. Mostly, it was her eyes that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. They were wide open, and such a pale shade of blue that they almost seemed white in the dim light of the ground fog. And they were like mirrors; reflecting a pair of images of himself back at him as he stared down at the lifeless body.

That was another thing, he thought. The body was so lifeless that it didn't seem like anything that had ever been alive. Yet once, when he first began digging the hole, he thought he saw one of her hands move. He had nearly crawled out of his own skin when he thought it saw it, and he frantically checked for a pulse. But the pressure caused the thin wrist to snap between his fingers. The dry sound caused him shake all over for a long time. But when he'd finished shaking, the memory at least made him dig all the faster.

At times, Wes didn't know exactly why he was digging a grave when it would have been simpler to call the authorities and report the whole thing as an accident instead. He had to remind himself several times that he couldn't call the police from his cell phone, since the service never worked this deep in the woods, and he couldn't just leave her there while he drove far enough away to connect to a signal, because that would technically have been hit and run. He could have, of course, put the frail, broken corpse in the back of his SUV and driven it to a hospital. But the thought of having it behind him as he drove was unthinkable. It seemed to become less recognizable as anything remotely human every time he glanced at it, as if it were changing before his very eyes.

No. The only proper thing to do under the circumstances was dig a hole with the folding shovel that had been left in the back of the car from a camping trip and give the thing a decent burial. He worried about consecrating the grave, wondering if a simple prayer would do. Wes didn't pray much, and he never went to church, so he doubted any prayer he uttered would be valid. So he told himself he'd stop at a church once he reached town, borrow some holy water or something, and splash it in a cross over the grave on his way home. The thought was comforting, and it allowed him to keep digging, even though he knew inside that he would never return here once the dirt had been shoveled back into the hole.

He never stopped to wonder who the woman was. He didn't want to know. After awhile, he didn't even look at her, because the sight of her frightened him. He just wanted to finish the grave, dump her inside it and then never think of the incident again.

And so he dug, tearing at the soft earth with his small, inadequate shovel. He dug with a frenzy of motion until he could feel the damp sweat spreading across his body from beneath his clothes. It made him feel clammy, but he didn't care. He just dug until the hole he made was two, then three and finally four feet deep.

Breathing hard, he buried the tip of the shovel into the pile of dirt beside the hole and climbed out, figuring that it was finally deep enough. The fog had grown denser while he worked so that now it was nearly impossible to see through at all. He waved his hands to clear it, but that had no effect. He worried about driving out of it, since he knew how bad the forest fog could be in late October. But that was something to deal with later. For now, there was still much to complete.

Wes turned around slowly and leaned down to pick up the frail form. He froze in his tracks.

The body was gone.

At first he thought he was mistaken, that the fog was so thick that he'd just misjudged the spot where the old woman had lain. But that wasn't it. He hadn't misjudged anything. The dead body just wasn't there. Wes fell to his knees and rubbed his hands through the dirt, stinging his fingers on the tips of the thick carpet of fallen pine needles nearby. But he felt nothing else. He sat up, suddenly cold with a wave of pure terror. That was when the fog cleared enough so he could see a patch of the soft earth before him. And that was when he saw the string of small, narrow footprints leading toward the road.

But what that seemed to indicate was impossible. The frail, dusty, broken thing he'd set in the dirt didn't seem as if it could have ever been living in the first place. To think that it could have gotten up and simply walked away was unthinkable. Still, he had avoided looking at it for most of the time he'd busied himself digging. Anything could have happened, he realized. An animal could have come and spirited it away, and he'd have never even noticed.

But he knew in this case that logic wouldn't work no matter how he tried to reason things out. Panic set in, and Wes clamored to his feet, nearly falling over from the effort since his legs seemed to have turned into jelly. He ran toward the road, running into a tree, wanting nothing in the world except to reach his car and drive as far away from this nightmare as fast as he possibly could.

But that proved to be impossible too, because when Wes burst out of the trees, it was only to discover that his ridiculously expensive and excessively large sports utility vehicle was no longer there either.

Wes stumbled into the center of the road looking around dumfounded. He tried to tell himself that it couldn't be gone, and he patted his pockets to feel the set of keys in them. Then he realized he'd left them in the rear hatch lock after retrieving the shovel. But he hadn't been that far in the woods. Even if someone had come across the vehicle and found the keys, he would have heard it's engine starting.

He turned in a circle, trying vainly to peer through the impenetrable fog.

And that was why, when his back was turned, that he didn't see the car speeding toward him. In fact, he only heard it and turned around when it was already too late. But in the fraction of a second remaining of his life, Wes saw two significant things. He saw the burning headlights and the grill between them and knew it was his SUV. More importantly, he saw a pair of eyes through the windshield that shined like twin mirrors. And he knew as soon as he saw them why he had been compelled to dig the grave.

He hadn't been digging it to bury the old woman.

He'd been digging it, all along, for himself.