School gave out for a four-day weekend when Thanksgiving rolled around. Briargate cleared out pretty well. Most students went home; a handful stayed behind, but only because they had nowhere else to go. Caleb returned to Steam Rock, Allison returned to Medula. Shannon spent the weekend in Milwaukee, with her maternal grandparents. All over town, all over the country, people gathered together with their family to celebrate and, of course, feast.

Late at night, after the humans had had their fill, something else feasted too.

If a person drove to the bottom of Clearwater's Main Street, turned right, and followed the road nearly as far as the town would allow, inevitably they'd come to Minerva Boulevard. It was an oddly extravagant name for what amounted to little more than a gravel pathway, but it was not the street that caught the eye. There were a few middle class homes clustered out that way—Jared Wilkins's own, as he'd told Shannon Malone—but the real attractions were Boulder Hill and McKenzie House, two of the oldest and largest homes within the town limits, lovingly referred to by many of the citizens as the Twin Eyesores.

Out on that gravel pathway that was called Minerva Boulevard, next to the imposing presences of Boulder Hill and McKenzie House, a modest farm took residence. There were some crops in the summer, a few chickens that wandered the grounds, and a lone old, fat cat with no name, but the real business was the cows. Kept for milk and beef, the cows grazed freely all over the fields; every so often an excited child would be taken to see them. Sometimes there seemed to be millions of them, a never-ending supply.

On Thanksgiving, 1955, every single one of them—and the chickens as well—was killed. The only survivor was the old, fat cat, and just how it had avoided the other animals' fate would never be known. When Samuel Kraus went out early Friday morning to start his work, he found the cat right in the middle of the carnage, licking its paws. Samuel had looked at the scene dumbly for a moment or two, then promptly lost the dry toast he'd had that morning. His animals were in pieces. His barn was a horror show. Cow limbs were scattered on the ground. Chicken feathers painted the walls.

Later, when the police arrived, stepping through cow guts and bits of chicken, even Horace Strickland was afraid. Afraid it was all connected, somehow.