PROLOGUE
1
In the woods behind her house, Maria told Juliette to close her eyes.
“Why?”
“It’s a surprise.”
Juliette did as asked. Freckles saddled her nose. At fifteen, she was all-American cute, pulling stares from boys at school, especially in their fifth-period English class where even the teacher watched her cross the room to sharpen her pencil.
“He walks in the woods,” Maria said.
Bailey, their third wheel, stared at the printout in her hands. Saggy jeans and an awful Ramones T-shirt made her look like a little kid.
“Come on,” Maria said. “This is supposed to be fun.”
Bailey’s mouth creased but she started reading, voice unsteady. “He walks in the woods. He lives in the spaces between the shadows. He haunts our dreams. He comes for us. He is hungry. He must be fed.”
“This is stupid,” Juliette said. Her blue dress billowed around pale knees.
Maria slipped the knife from a front pocket.
Fading sunlight streaked the sky red and orange. Mosquitoes hummed. Trees towered all around. In the distance, little kids laughed and cars thumped across a bridge.
Juliette was peeking.
Maria hid the knife flat along her thigh. “Eyes closed, Julie.”
She sighed, slapped her arm. “I’m getting bit.”
“Read the rest,” Maria said.
“He walks in the woods. He lives forever. He is eternal.”
“Keep going.”
Another arm slap. “Seriously. We’re not little kids. This is dumb.”
“We’re almost done.”
Darkness creeped through the trees, shadows eating the light.
A bird’s cry echoed.
Maria opened the knife until the blade locked in place. She bought it for thirteen dollars at Gander Mountain. The guy at the counter pushed greasy hair behind his ears and asked her if she knew how to handle a knife like that. She played the flirt and let him show her. He asked how old she was, and she said, Old enough.
“The rest, Bailey.”
Bailey swallowed. The paper crinkled. “We come here as day dies to offer supplication to he who lives forever. Only the gift of death can save us.”
“I’m not scared,” Juliette said. She lifted her dress in a curtsy and hummed a stupid pop song.
“Patience, Julie. The surprise is coming.”
“She’s right. This is stupid,” Bailey said. She folded the paper, but couldn’t meet Maria’s stare.
“Don’t you dare, Bailey.”
“Let’s go,” Juliette said. Sunset-orange brushed her open eyes.
The knife, curved to a tip and serrated along the straight edge, pointed at her.
Disgust trumped fear. “I’m not doing that blood-friendship thing.”
“That’s not what this is.”
Bailey was a blind witness, refusing to look.
Juliette swallowed, fear creeping into her now and that was good. As it should be. Life wasn’t all bare legs and cute smiles. Would Juliette insult her? Maybe say something derogatory about Maria and Bailey’s friendship. Go ahead. Jealousy burned hot.
“I’m going home,” Julie said.
Children’s laughter floated above them.
“What about your surprise?”
She played the knife slowly back and forth.
Juliette straightened, flattened her dress. “You’re sick.”
“That the best you can do?”
She stared, her breath quickening, and that was good too, would make it faster. She huffed, a little girl trying to be tough, and started away. Ground debris crunched under her flip-flops, pink like her toenails.
Maria went for her.
Bailey finally looked up. “No!”
Juliette spun around, and there was the knife cutting through the air, and her hands came up in defense. Sliced her palms. She screeched more in surprise than pain.
“What the fuck? Look what you—”
Maria stabbed Julie’s hand, the girl’s eyes going huge, and then she shoved it all the way through flesh and bone. Julie spasmed, a scream dying in her throat.
Maria pushed hard and they stumbled several feet before Julie tripped and Maria landed on top of her. The knife pushed in to the hilt and the blade pierced her stomach. She gagged, mouth wide, eyes enormous shadows. The sharp metallic-bite of blood mixed with her apple-scented body spray.
Her free arm batted at Maria, smacked her in the head.
The knife came out with a hard, mushy yank. Blood slipped from the blade. Soaked her dress.
“Stop,” Bailey said. “STOP!”
Juliette convulsed, choked. Her face paled. She swallowed several times. “Please,” she said.
The next stab was a hard and merciless punch between her breasts.
After that, it was like beating a rag doll.
2
Bailey said nothing on the way back, head down. Maria walked tall, a strange grin on her face, her red hands at her sides. Blood stained her arms and blotted her clothes.
Three little kids ran in a circle in her neighbor’s backyard. They laughed and cheered. Maria could not tell who was chasing whom. A woman stood on the deck, watching, a yellow light behind her. The woman raised a hand to Maria. Backlit, the woman was a faceless shadow person.
Maria waved back. Moonlight darkened the blood to oily smears.
She did not tell Bailey to keep her mouth shut, and it was just as well. In the bathroom, Maria stared at herself, black hair long and silky, pale cheeks splashed with blood. She pulled two fingers down her cheek through the blood to reveal the tannish birthmark beneath.
Maria scrubbed her arms, and her mother pushed open the door mid-sentence and was halfway through explaining the latest office gossip when she stopped.
They stared at each other.
“It wasn’t my fault,” Maria said.
Watery blood splashed against white porcelain and whirled down the drain.
CHAPTER SIX
1
Rudy Steinmann loved working with the dead.
He passed through the doors into the basement of Crichton Medical. The morgue. His steps echoed in the large, cold room, and he felt perfectly at ease. Some people thought places like this—morgues, funeral homes, crematoriums—were creepy, but for Rudy it was all the floors above him crammed with coughing, vomiting patients and curt, inconsiderate doctors that was unsettling. Down here, it was peaceful. Always calm.
Gabriel Wilcox, zippered shut in a black body bag, waited for him.
Most of the bodies Rudy examined were elderly, people who succumbed to the flu or pneumonia or strokes or cancer, but there were also middle-aged men whose hearts lost the fight against fast food, and lately there were men and women in their twenties and thirties who found the end of the road in a needle.
In addition to believing morgues were macabre places, most people probably believed coroners were solitary weirdoes. What kind of person wanted to spend time with corpses?
Rudy was not some weirdo, at least he didn’t think so. Working with the dead was a perpetual lesson in empathy. He felt bad for every single person. No matter the cause of death, each person deserved a moment of recognition, an appreciation of a life gone quiet.
Nothing was worse, however, than a dead child.
Gabe Wilcox hadn’t even started school yet. Five years old. Sometimes cancer took children. Or some other malevolent sickness. But usually it was an accident, and Rudy couldn’t stop himself from wondering what the hell the parents were doing while their child played by an unwatched pool or busy road or plugged in a table saw or got the cap off a bottle of antifreeze.
Or got their hands on a gun.
Rudy stood above the body bag: on the table before him, zippered, still. The bag looked so small on the large metal table.
Rudy was almost forty, single, childless. Perhaps that fit with the isolated, weirdo stereotype, but he loved his life and his career. Loved that he could bear witness to the unavoidable finale most everyone else ignored. Death was coming for everyone. Ignoring it was foolish. If more people spent time with the dead, they might appreciate life more and the fragility of their mortality.
He should write an article, maybe even a book, about—ironically—life. A coroner’s lessons on living. That had a good ring to it. It could be part memoir, starting with his first encounter with death when he was barely older than Gabe Wilcox and found a bleeding bunny in the garden. Something had clawed a good chunk out of its side. He brought it in the house, tried to bandage its wounds with paper towels, and get it to drink water, but the poor thing’s rapid breathing slowed and slowed and slowed until it was still. His father dug a hole in the garden and Rudy buried the bunny wrapped in a baby-blue bandanna.
Rudy grabbed the zipper and—
Inside the bag, breath sucked in like wind, as strong as a swimmer’s gasp at the water’s surface or the startled inhale dividing sleep from startled consciousness.
The bag pulled in with the breath, a concave dip.
Rudy went cold but didn’t fall back or scream. He was seeing things. Hearing them too. A trick of the mind. He was mourning for this poor child and thinking about that bunny all those years ago and his mind tried to . . . what, make the kid seem alive? He needed a cigarette. He quit the damn things ten years ago, but he vividly saw himself tearing off the plastic and sliding one cancer stick out and bringing it to his lips and—
The bag sucked in again, harder, violently.
In death, bodies could behave rather lively. Gases built up and found ways to escape. Dead people farted, especially when he was transporting them from table to storage, and occasionally they belched or wheezed.
As if alive and breathing.
He’d seen his share of movies where corpses came to life inside morgues just like this one, overhead lights reflecting off all the shining metal and yet somehow not driving away the shadows, and he’d had a moment or two of disquiet working down here, a few goosebumps and a mild up-tick of his heart (empathetic or not, he could suffer the “willies,” too), but what he felt now was the cold sweat and loose limbs of genuine fear.
The boy’s head was destroyed. The paramedics had scooped up skull fragments.
He could not be breathing.
The room was quiet, but suddenly vast and filled with hiding places. A faucet drip-drip-dripped with hollow echoes. A few bodies not yet examined or properly documented lay before him in zippered bags on metal tables. And how many more corpses were stashed in the cold chambers behind him, the wall like a giant filing cabinet?
A papery sheet covered a body at the far end of the room on whom he still had to perform an autopsy, but a pinkish arm shone from the edge of the sheet and a woman’s long hair dangled free over the edge of the table in greasy tangles.
No cause of death. Yet.
The bag before him twitched.
Rudy’s breathing caught in his throat and his ears filled with the static of silence. He backed up several steps. Drip. Drip. Drip. He heard people in the hall talking. Maybe they would come in here and that would make him feel better about opening the bag and—
The bag shook and jabbed outward in violent punches. Another panicky inhalation, long and trembling, and the scream that throbbed inside the bag was high-pitched and worse than anything he ever heard in any stupid horror movie.
He might have screamed, run into the hall, pale-faced and shaking, but Rudy Steinman was no coward. He yanked the zipper down the length of the bag and pulled it wide. Whatever mangled thing lay inside, it had once been a boy, not some monster. Not something to fear.
Short, skinny arms flung outwards and five-year-old Gabe Wilcox pitched upward as if propelled by a spring into a sitting position. Face red and blotchy with tears and dried blood, Gabe was alive—and whole.
He took the boy in his arms. Gabe cried and begged for his mommy, and he clung to Rudy’s neck as if afraid letting go would drop him back into whatever darkness he had escaped.
Tissuey globules speckled the inside of the bag—pieces of the boy’s brain.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Several feet beyond the tree line, Chance leaned his bike against a tree. He thought of turning it around so it faced out, in case he had to make a quick escape, but that was silly. Escape from what?
Ghosts?
Chance’s heart was beating a bit too fast. “Why did you ask about ghosts?”
Nichols walked ahead of Chance. He used his cane to push aside jutting branches and he moved with confidence, as if he knew every uneven slope and protruding root.
The trees stretched high above; their branches formed an almost solid leaf-ceiling. Sunlight glowed in the gaps like stars. Shadows thickened among the bare trunks and over the dirt ground.
It was cooler back here and Chance stiffened his muscles against a rising chill. He detected a faint rotting smell, like when two-day-old leftovers began to stink up the garbage in the kitchen. Somewhere around here, somewhere close, an animal lay in desiccated pieces, its guts torn free and consumed, and whatever part of it that could rot was giving off this nasty odor.
Chance almost stopped, almost turned back.
Ah, shit, Jimmy would say, you made it barely thirty feet back there and you pussied out?
“Remember what I said about the pyramids?” Nichols asked.
He had lengthened the distance between them so Chance had to hurry and close the gap to hear him. Nichols remained face-forward, moving with determined steps. He was a shadow himself, a dark figure cutting through darkness.
“Pyramids?” Chance said when he was closer.
Up above somewhere in the thick tangle of branches, crows cawed back and forth as if engaged in heated debate.
“No one knows exactly how they were constructed,” Nichols said. “You mentioned slaves, and that’s the popular explanation, but it would require hundreds of thousands of slaves and hundreds and hundreds of years. Maybe that still sounds possible, but there is evidence the pyramids were constructed much faster.”
“So?”
Nichols laughed a little. It sounded kind of strange somehow and seemed to echo around them. They hadn’t gone too far back into the woods, but Chance couldn’t see any of the houses on Revival or any of Carter Road where they’d cut through. In fact, he couldn’t hear anything from the neighborhood. The place was never that loud, except on July Fourth when everyone disregarded the law and lit the sky on fire, but there was always the hum of cars passing through or the laughter of little kids playing tag or the incessant yap of someone’s dog.
He heard no such sounds.
As if they were several miles from any of it.
“People think aliens showed the Egyptians how to construct the pyramids. Do you believe in aliens?”
“No,” Chance said quickly.
“Neither do I. Which means something else was at work.”
“Like what?”
The woods thickened and Nichols had to turn sideways to pass between the thick tree trunks. Something was carved on one of them. A jagged cross. The bark was torn away to expose moist, light-colored wood. It looked like an open wound.
He reached out to touch it and stopped. He wasn’t afraid, not exactly, but it felt wrong to touch that carved cross. Sacrilegious somehow. Ridiculous. They weren’t in a church. They weren’t anywhere—just hiking through stupid woods, and yet . . .
“You think I carved that?” Nichols had stopped, was looking at him. Shadows hollowed his eyes, dented his cheeks.
Chance’s hand hovered over the cross.
“Touch it,” Nichols said. “Go ahead.”
His hand moved closer, his fingers almost there. The air felt warmer, like the tree was emanating heat. Did trees give off heat? He’d never thought about that before. His fingers twitched and he lowered his arm. The cross was glowing. A trick of the light.
“Why are we back here?” Chance asked, sounding like a child, frightened but trying to be tough.
“Ley Lines,” Nichols said, a professor introducing the day’s lecture. “Think of nature. Look around. Do you see anything that grows in perfect lines? You might be tempted to say the trees are straight, but there are far too many imperfections in even the most rigidly straight tree. Or circles. A straight line forced to connect with itself. And yet there are no perfect circles in nature. Pebbles and rocks only get close.”
“The moon,” Chance said. “The sun.”
Nichols held up a finger. “Excellent point and yet neither of those is exactly a perfect circle. Our eyes interpret them that way, but they are not round. The Earth is not round, either. It’s a spheroid.”
“So?”
“Nature doesn’t know a straight line in any form.”
“But something back here is?”
“Perceptive. The answer, however, depends on how you want to qualify your question.”
Chance had no idea what Nichols meant.
Turn around and go back.
He should, no question. This was stupid. He wasn’t scared, not really, but this was a waste of time. He needed to practice his routine. Tomorrow the world would discover The Golden Wheel. He had to practice, make his routine perfect.
He started to fumble out an excuse for turning back when a noise unlike any other sound quaked around them. It was an animal, something big and loud, and it sounded angry or maybe hurt, which amounted to the same when it came to behavior. If some creature were back here, a bear or a bobcat, and they stumbled upon it, and it was pissed or hurt, the thing was going to attack.
Only it hadn’t sounded exactly like an animal’s cry or growl. It had been distorted and seemed to come from all around them, as if the air itself were making that noise. Or the trees.
God, how pathetic could he be? The trees? This wasn’t some fantasy story with talking plants and evil goblins.
Maybe it’s the monster under your bed. This is where it really lives. It feeds off the shadows and stalks among the trees and at night it creeps through the darkness out of the trees and into your house and nestles beneath your bed, and now you’re here, in its home, and out here there’s no blanket to pull over your head, no nightlight upon which to depend, and it knows every tree and every shadow and can seize you with its claws or snatch you with its fang-crammed mouth.
The woods were silent. Sweat trickled down his neck where the hair stood at attention.
What was that sound? Had to be an animal.
Or a ghost.
No. The woods were creepy to begin with, but that didn’t mean ghosts actually existed. It didn’t mean there wasn’t some logical, non-supernatural explanation for the sound. Of course there was. Chance had never spent much time walking in any forest, but with all these trees around—and the branches way up high with all those leaves blocking out the sun—it made sense that sounds would be distorted, echoes would be weird. It was Mother Nature’s very own GarageBand back here. She could warble noises and overlap sounds and mix and match to create a terrible sort of music.
“We’re close,” Nichols said.
He resumed walking. His cane poked at the ground every few feet. He did it with enough strength to make it seem like he was stabbing at something, trying to keep something back—or kill it.
An oily, thick darkness covered the ground. Chance lifted one foot from the shadows and darkness like oil clung to his sneaker. It slipped free and Chance stood on one foot a moment, knowing he must look stupid but unable to unwrangle his mind from what he was seeing.
Shadows didn’t do that.
He lowered his foot to just above the ankle-high dark. Finger tendrils stretched up along the rubber edges. Fog moved like this, stretching and bending when disturbed by movement, and yet the way the shadows elongated in squid tentacles and squirmed along his foot was very much not like fog.
It’s alive, he thought.
He lowered his foot back into that darkness, and shadows curled over his foot in spectral hands and tugged it down. That had to be a trick of his mind. Shadows weren’t made of anything. They couldn’t tug, couldn’t willfully form tentacles or fingers.
Nichols was ten feet ahead and moving faster. “. . . mystical lines that . . . according to the natural . . . life-giving properties . . .”
Life-giving? Did he say ‘life-giving’?
Chance tried to call out to him and no sound came. His throat tightened and now he couldn’t quite get enough air into his lungs. Heat flushed through him but the cold stuck on his skin and his underarms pushed sweat and his balls tightened to pebbles wedged into his groin.
The shadows weighted his feet in place.
All in your head.
It’s mud, that’s all. He couldn’t see where he was going and he had no cane to test the ground as Nichols was doing and so he’d stepped right into a muddy pit and now he only thought he couldn’t move. Just mud. No big deal.
But that didn’t calm him. Not at all. He gasped for breath, only it wasn’t a gasp because he couldn’t suck in any air. He made a terrible, straining croak that sounded like the last cry of someone dying in some shitty third-world hospital. He’d seen pictures of those places in history class. People died from all sorts of hideous diseases in places like that. Those people believed not in germs but in evil spirits.
Nichols was gone. The trees crowded closer.
That pungent, rotting odor swelled thicker and more strongly, as if he were standing in the rotting corpse of some animal.
That sound birthed around him again.
It roared into a world-consuming scream that throbbed in his ears and rattled his brain, and his whole body trembled and tears fell freely, and he tasted the scream on his tongue as something cold, slimy, and squirming with rot. If he tried to scream himself, this otherworldly noise would lunge down his throat and bite right through his heart like an invisible shark.
Only it wouldn’t be invisible. It was real. When Nichols wandered back this way, he would find Chance on the ground, his body torn wide, guts sluicing free, shadow claws spreading his ruptured chest wider and wider.
The sound whined down like the town emergency alarm that hollered across all of Warrenville to summon voluntary firemen. That alarm took several minutes to completely dissipate, as if it were from some enormous beast unleashing a long-confined cry that it didn’t want to finish, but this sound—so much like that auditory beacon and yet far more menacing, a scream summoning all evil, hungry things—slowed and stopped at once as if swallowed by something even larger.
The trees shimmered out of focus. The world blurred around him.
Something was behind him.
I wrote my first
story in second grade. It was about a raindrop that is born in a cloud and
lives its entire life until it dies in a splashy death on a sidewalk. My
teacher gave me A+++ on it. In fourth grade, I wanted to be a movie director
and my parents bought me a book on screenwriting. I still have that book, with
all the embarrassing highlighting and annotating notes I made. I would spend
recess off by myself writing screenplays in a composition book. When I got
home, I’d type up what I’d written using my mother’s typewriter. In high
school, I started writing horror short stories, and I sold my first one when I
was seventeen. From then on, I’ve never stopped writing.
I have two coffin bookcases in my office.
One of them was commissioned by my father from a carpenter because he wanted a
coffin to lie in on Halloween, while in full costume, of course, to best scare
trick-or-treaters, but the coffin also had to serve a purpose during the rest
of the year. The other bookcase my friends and I made years later when we
operated a local haunted attraction at the Brotherhood Winery in
Washingtonville, NY. In the coffins I keep my Stephen King collection and, I’m
delighted to say, the beginning of what I hope will be many, many books with my
name on them.
I accidentally wrote an entire book
with my friend Mark. It started as a quick back-and-forth writing
exercise—write a page in a notebook and hand it over, and repeat—but we kept
doing it for three years. Now, we’ve got an entire book. I hope it won’t take
three years to type it up.
People who think horror fans, and
especially horror writers, are deranged and troubled. Some of us are, sure, but
most of us like horror because it’s cool. The horror community is extremely
welcoming and supportive, so call us freaks if you want but you’re missing out
on a good time.
I was born in Bellevue, NJ, and raised
in Washingtonville, NY, in the gorgeous Hudson Valley.
Lame as it may sound, I’d spend it as I
spend many of my days: reading, writing, petting my cats, and being with my wife.
My mother is my hero. After my father
died when I was eleven, she raised me by herself. She taught me what it takes
to have responsibilities, to get up every day and go to work, she taught me how
to be a good person, how to function as an adult, how to do what’s right even
when it’s difficult. And in her last year, she taught me what it means to be
strong, stoic, and resilient. In her final moments, she taught me something
about death I hadn’t known, peace and mercy.
Depends. If I’m hungry, you should be
worried.
I’m an incredibly passionate supporter
of free speech. Censorship is the dictator’s first and most powerful tool. I
also enthusiastically support animal organizations.
I read to get stimulated, to be taken
away into someone else’s imagination—and to relax.
I'm not a parent, yet, so we’ll see . .
.
Crazy teacher, horror writer.
I sold my first story when I was
seventeen. It was titled “The Perfect Student and His Crystal Ball of
Intellect.” I was so proud, I submitted it to my English teacher for extra
credit. She sent me to Guidance because she said it was “troubling.” Sitting in
Guidance answering questions about a story I created, I knew I’d become a
writer.
My most recent, Revival Road, would
make, I think, a kickass movie or limited series.
I’ve been to Poe’s grave in Baltimore.
A cat, no question. When I write, my
cats gather in my office. They’re literary creatures.
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