This time he waited a stubborn fifteen minutes, wanting to see words appear on the screen, but nothing happened. Finally he lifted the baseball bat out from under the bed and went downstairs to check the basement. He’d just finished looking in all of the dark corners and hidden spaces when he heard the familiar AOL voice upstairs announcing e-mail.

Familiarity may not always breed contempt, but it does lessen fear of the unusual. Dale was more curious than anxious when he walked into the study to see what the uninvited hacker had to say.

>thaere theode thaer men habbath hunda haefod & of thaere eorthan on thaere aeton men hi selfe

Dale felt the flesh above his spine go cold. “Barguest” sounded like some young hacker’s screen name, all right, but how many teenage hackers knew Old English? Dale stared at the words, forcing himself to slip into his English professor mode.

“From the nation where men have the head of a dog and from the country where men devour each other.”Nice. Dale didn’t know where the quote was from—it sounded like a quote to him—but he knew that it wasn’t from Beowulf or any of the other epics he’d taught. “. . . the country where men devour each other.”

Thinking of Beowulf, he looked back at the word “barguest.” It wasn’t in any form of Old English that he recognized, but it had that Germanic feel to it. “Geist” meant spirit or ghost, and “bar” could stand for “bier”—as in “funeral bier.” He flexed his fingers over the keyboard and took a few more deep breaths before typing,>Well, you’re clever, but rude, Barguest. Speaking from ambush isn’t polite. I’ll chat with you if and when you tell me how you’ve hacked into my computer and who you are. Do you prefer modern English or Old English?

This time he did not wait around. He had not quite made it to the kitchen when the voice announced new mail.

>Welcome back, Dale. But be careful. We must find what we have lost. Cerberus der arge/und alle sine warge/die an hem heingem.

Dale exhaled slowly. If he was not mistaken, the last part of the message was Middle High German. Dale didn’t speak or read all that fluently in modern German, much less Middle High German, but he’d been required to do some doctoral research in the language, and at least one of his colleagues had been urging him for years to study and teach certain Middle High German epics as a prelude to Beowulf. He tried to print the page, but his printer would not go on-line unless he was in Windows 98 and he was sure he’d lose the DOS page if he opened Windows, so Dale grabbed a legal pad and pen and copied down everything on the screen. Beneath those notes, he translated the poem.

Cerberus the arg (“arag”? Old Norse “argr”?)

and all the wargs (wolves? outlaws? corpse-worriers?)

who follow him.

It was strange that he had seen that Old English word “warg,” derived from the German, only last night—in both his handwriting and Clare’s—in the margins of his Norton’s Anthology’s Beowulf. His hands were shaking slightly as he turned back to the keyboard:

>Enough. Who the hell are you? How do you know me? And what, exactly, have we lost?

He walked back to the kitchen and waited, but no AOL voice summoned him back. Several times he returned to the study, saw the lines on the screen but nothing new, and then walked out of the room, pacing through the dining room with its coffinlike learning machines, standing in the living room looking out at the gray rain, even going down into the basement awhile. No voice. No new message.

Finally Dale went back to the study and loaded Windows 98. He clicked on the AOL icon and tapped in his access code. The modem in the ThinkPad clicked, but the message came up,“No dial tone.” Angry now, Dale went out to the Land Cruiser and dragged in his cell phone. He hooked the phone to the modem and tried again. Now the modem found a dial tone, but the legend came up, “Unable to connect to AOL number.” On the phone itself, the display continued to readNO SERVICE. He exited Windows to DOS. The screen was empty after the C prompt. He loaded Windows and AOL again, but could not get on-line.

After twenty minutes of messing with it all, Dale ripped the phone out, exited AOL, and shut off the goddamned computer. He looked at the notes on his legal pad again. “Cerberus the arg and all the wargs who follow him.” He knew Cerberus, of course—the three-headed dog who guarded the entrance to the underworld, the infernal regions, the land of the dead—but he had no clue as to what the quote meant.

Whoever this asshole hacker was, he was clever and literate, but he was still an asshole.

Too agitated to try to write, Dale grabbed his parka—returning to the study for the baseball bat—and went outside for a walk. The rain had stopped and the air had actually become warmer, but a fog had rolled in. Dale guessed that he could see less than fifty feet. The black, contorted silhouette of the first dead crabapple tree along the driveway was visible, but the barn and outbuildings had disappeared. His white Land Cruiser, beaded with moisture, looked only semisolid in the weak light and creeping fog. The eaves dripped.

From somewhere in the direction of the invisible chicken coop, a dog howled. It howled again.

Dale actually grinned. After hefting the baseball bat and slapping it against his palm a couple of times, he tugged the hood of his parka up and went hunting for the hound.

The fog changed the straightforward little Illinois farm into a foreign country. The dog had ceased howling the instant that Dale had stepped off the side porch, and he could not be certain of directions, since the shifting walls of fog both muffled and distorted sounds. He walked toward the chicken coop. The house and his truck disappeared in rolling gray behind him.

We must find what we have lost.Aloud, speaking in a Jay Silverheels voice, Dale said into the fog, “Who’s this ‘we,’ white man?”

His voice sounded strange and lost in the gray blankness.

We must find what we have lost.

“Here, doggy, doggy, doggy,” called Dale, swinging the bat in one hand. He had no intention of hitting the pooch—he’d never hurt an animal, or a human being, for that matter—but he was tired of being spooked by the thing. Anne had done a lot of research on dogs before they bought Hasso, their little terrier, and she had explained how they were still pack animals—obeying a pack hierarchy, demonstrating either dominance or submission. For instance, they had never cured Hasso of licking—a classic submissive behavior most people confuse with affection. A submissive dog in the wild licks the pack leader or those hounds above it in pack hierarchy in order to receive food in return. This black dog probably hadn’t worked out its dominance/submission issues with Dale yet. He decided that he’d help it along.

We must find what we have lost.Setting aside the royal “we” for a moment, Dale pondered that phrase. He had come here to Duane’s old farm because he felt that he had lost everything—Anne and the girls, Clare, his job, the respect of his peers, his self-respect, and his ability to write—but down deep, Dale knew that this attitude was all self-pity and mummery. He still had some money in the bank; the ranch could be his again in ten months after the renters’ lease was up; he might not truly be on sabbatical, but odds favored him returning to teach at the University of Montana again next year if he so chose. He had a $50,000 sport utility vehicle parked in the farmhouse’s muddy turnaround, and it was fully paid for. He was sixty-some pages into a new novel and he had a publisher who hadn’t given up on him yet. No, he hadn’t lost everything—far from it.