Riverwatch

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

1 AN UNEXPECTED DISCOVERY

2 LEGENDS

3 BLAKE

4 GAME NIGHT

5 HALLORAN

6 BENEATH THE SURFACE

7 WILSON

8 RESURRECTION

9 A DEATH EXPLAINED?

10 A DEATH IN THE NIGHT

11 LEGENDS FROM THE PAST

12 BLOODSTONE

13 GRUESOME DISCOVERIES

14 A SUMMONS IN THE NIGHT

15 A WITNESS IN THE DARK

16 PREMONITIONS

17 RIVERWATCH

18 TO PROTECT AND SERVE

19 WARNINGS

20 FORENSICS

21 CONFRONTATION

22 A MESSAGE FROM BEYOND

23 PUZZLE PIECES

24 THE LAST OF A NOBLE RACE

25 THE BATON PASSES

26 REVELATIONS

27 CONNECTIONS

28 FOREST GREEN REVISITED

29 DECISION TIME

30 RIVERWATCH

31 REPERCUSSIONS

32 ATTACK PLANS

33 FIRST STRIKE

34 A FIERY END

35 AFTERMATH

36 THE BEGINNING OF THE END

37 REQUIEM

38 HUNTING ONCE MORE

39 MYSTICAL METHODS

40 PREPARATIONS

41 ILLUSIONS

42 INFERNO

EPILOGUE

PRAISE FOR JOSEPH NASSISE AND HIS ACCLAIMED DEBUT WORK OF HORROR

RIVERWATCH

NOMINATED FOR THE 2001 BRAM STOKER AWARD FOR SUPERIOR ACHIEVEMENT IN A FIRST NOVEL

NOMINATED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL HORROR GUILD AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN A FIRST NOVEL FOR 2001

“A heady brew of horror and suspense that has an intense and original flavor. This book has both imagination and muscle. Expect great things from Joe Nassise.”

—Tom Piccirilli, Bram Stoker Award–winning author ofA Lower Deep andHexes

“This is exactly the sort of story that got me interested in horror fiction as a child and has kept me reading it ever since. It’s character-driven, has a fascinating back-story and is honestly scary. Nassise earns high marks for his handling of characterization, pacing, plotting and his multi-viewpoint narration. Simply stated, his novel is just plain fun.”

—Hellnotes

“Joe Nassise’s fiction reads like a skilled boxer—a jab, a cross, and ultimately a superb knockout.”

—John F. Merz, author of the Lawson Vampire series

“Riverwatchis a stunning debut novel, intricately plotted and beautifully written. Nassise knows that a good ‘monster’ novel needs to be fast paced and terrifying… and he delivers action and frights galore! Watch out for Joe Nassise…. He’s already made his mark.”

—Tim Lebbon, British Fantasy Award–winning author ofFace andThe Nature of Balance

“From cover to cover this book will keep you riveted to the pages and on the edge of your seat. If you think nothing can scare you anymore, give this talented author the chance to prove you wrong…. I guarantee you will not be disappointed.”

—Alternate Realities

“Intense and hard-hitting…. Comparable to the writings of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child.Riverwatch is the type of horror novel that is compiled of precise amounts of suspense and gore, producing some truly frightening scenes.Riverwatch may be Nassise’s first novel, but I hope it is not his last; he is the kind of talented writer that can shine in a tight-knit genre of select writers.”

—Phillip Tomasso, author ofTenth House andThird Ring

“A solid, haunting, and evocative piece of work….Riverwatch is not to be missed, and Nassise is definitely a writer to keep an eye on.”

—Bram Stoker–nominated author Greg Gifune

“Riverwatchis a horror fan’s delight! I couldn’t put this down until I was finished. Nassise’s voice is a mixture of Douglass Clegg and Frank Perretti but uniquely his own. Don’t miss it!”

—Brian Keene, author ofNo Rest for the Wicked

“Dark caverns, secret chambers, and unspeakable evil….Riverwatch doesn’t disappoint!”

—Staci Layne Wilson, author ofHorrors of the Holy

“Horror fans have a special treat in store…. A genuinely frightening novel…. Nassise is a gifted storyteller…. [A] must read.”

—Harriet Klausner

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

Copyright © 2000, 2001 by Joseph M. Nassise

Published by arrangement with Barclay Books, LLC

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Barclay Books, LLC, 6161 51st Street South, St. Petersburg, FL 33715

ISBN: 0-7434-8040-6

Visit us on the World Wide Web:

http://www.SimonSays.com

POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

This book is dedicated to my parents:

For my father, who by his example

taught me how to be a husband and a father.

For my mother, who by her constant encouragement

gave me the courage to chase my dreams.

Thank you both for always believing.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’d foremost like to thank my wife, Dawn, who found the original handwritten manuscript of this novel in a shoe box in the closet and insisted that I submit it. Without her, this book wouldn’t exist.

In addition, my thanks also go out to my agent, Bob Diforio, for taking a chance on an unknown writer; my editor, Amy Pierpont, for working closely with me to bring this book into your hands; the many members of the Horror Writers Association whose votes placed this book on the Bram Stoker Award ballot in its original small press version; the judges of the International Horror Guild Awards who likewise saw fit to nominate it in their best first novel category; and to my friends Jon and Drew, for offering encouragement and critique of not only this work but my writing in general.

1

AN UNEXPECTED DISCOVERY

It’s a tombstone.

The notion came out of nowhere; seeping into his consciousness the way fog sweeps off the sea on a cool summer evening, insidiously sliding into the center of his thoughts. Once there, it stuck hard and fast. The stone did, indeed, resemble a gravestone. The outer edges had been beveled at a slight angle, giving it a simple yet unmistakable sense of dignity. It had also been sealed to the dirt floor with mortar.

If it was a tombstone, then whose was it?

Why put it here, hidden beneath a river?

It just didn’t make sense. Staring at it, Jake decided it had been a difficult afternoon. This latest addition to his troubles had started fifteen minutes ago, with Rick’s arrival in his trailer.

“We need you in the cellar, boss.”

“What the hell for, Rick?” Jake Caruso replied without turning. “You know Blake wants these estimates finished before two o’clock. I don’t have time to look at every little thing that goes wrong. That’s why I appointed you foreman, remember?” Jake was tired; the work had been going well, but Blake was on his back about even the tiniest details. It was starting to get to him.Why can’t the man just back off and let me do my job? Jake wondered, not for the first time.

Rick’s reply surprised him. “I know, boss, but I think you’d better come on down. It’s important.”

His solemn tone was what caught Jake’s attention. Turning away from the work before him, Jake looked at Rick and started in surprise. His friend’s lips were pressed tightly together. The tension in his jaw was easy to see despite the man’s effort to hide it. His usually ruddy face had gone sickly gray, and the cheerful light in his eyes had dulled to a lusterless sheen.

Jake’s aggravation with the interruption vanished. Rick was the perpetual optimist. For him to look this bad could only mean that something major had gone wrong. Images of bloodied flesh raced through Jake’s mind, with visions of men crushed by powerful tools.

“What happened? Somebody hurt? Should I call an ambulance?” Jake asked, reaching for the phone.

Rick held up his hands in a placating gesture. “No need for that. Nobody’s been hurt. The crew in the basement found something I think you should look at, that’s all.”

That was it. When pressed for more details, Rick refused to say anything more.

Tossing his pen aside and running a hand through his already disheveled hair, Jake agreed to go look.

The two men left the trailer and crossed the lawn to the wide veranda that encircled the house. Climbing the steps, they entered through the front door. Moving along the foyer, they passed through the dining room, the butler’s pantry, then down the flight of servants’ stairs that led into the basement, where Jake’s crew had been working for several days.

The home’s original owner had made use of the land’s natural features, routing a nearby stream directly through the cellar. The stream’s steady flow turned a large waterwheel, which in turn generated electricity for the estate. Ultimately, the owner’s eccentricity had caused more harm than good, for over the years the stream had backed up and pooled in the building’s basement. Now it was nothing more than a deep stagnant pool.

Blake, the present owner, had decided that the cellar was to become a wine-storing area. Jake’s men had dammed what was left of the stream out on the east side of the property earlier in the week and spent the last two days pumping the last of the water out of the cellar. The streambed would be filled with concrete and a foundation laid for the hardwood floors, as Blake had requested.

As they descended the flight of rickety old steps, the smell of mildew and rot wafted up toward them. It reminded Jake of childhood days spent hunting crayfish in swampy creek beds. The stench was the same. At the base of the stairs he paused and surveyed the job his men had done. Bright lights had been erected to illuminate the area, and in their harsh glare Jake judged the height the water had risen over the years by the dark stain left on the wall. Beneath this mark, layers of green slime and algae still hung, shimmering in the light. The air was heavy with dampness, making Jake feel as if he were walking through a vertical curtain of dew. He could see the wide trench that extended from one side of the house to the other, neatly bisecting it before disappearing out the opposite side. Rick led him over to the edge and pointed down.

* * *

Now, staring at the stone, Jake realized that Rick was speaking.

“…the last few inches of water about an hour ago, and I sent a few of the men into the trench to start widening it out. I was hoping we’d be able to start laying the pipe for the drainage system this afternoon, then we uncovered this thing.”

Jake’s gaze had not left the stone. He guessed it to be about six feet long and three feet wide. One corner had been chipped away, exposing an open space beneath and revealing that the stone was at least several inches thick.

“I had one of my men break it open just to make sure it wasn’t an old storeroom or well shaft. When I saw what it really was, I didn’t want to touch anything else until you’d had a chance to take a look,” Rick said, handing a flashlight to Jake.

Jake took the flashlight and jumped down into the trench, moving closer to the stone. The muck at the bottom of the trench sucked at the soles of his shoes and coated them with a foul-smelling mud. He didn’t care; his interest was on the slab of stone before him. Bending down beside it, he ran his hand along the surface where the men had cleaned off the layers of mud that had collected over the years. He was surprised to find it extremely smooth.

“Don’t bother,” Rick said from his position above. “There isn’t any writing on it. I already checked. But take a peek into the hole beneath it.”

Jake flipped on the flashlight and shined its beam down into the darkness beneath the slab. The light pierced the gloom lurking there, giving him a clear view of what lay beyond.

He realized what it was that had upset his foreman.

Stone stairs lay just beneath the stone.

Leading down.

Deeper into the earth.

“What the… ?” Jake mumbled to himself. He reached into the opening with one hand and ran a finger lightly over the top step. It was coated with a thick layer of dust that stirred slightly with the movement. There was no sign that any of the water that had lain overhead so long had seeped through. On a hunch, Jake reached sideways and felt the inner surface of the nearby wall.

That, too, was bone dry.

It also was solid stone.

Jake sat back on his haunches and looked up at Rick. “We can’t do any more work until we check this out. Send a couple of men out to my truck. There should be some crowbars in the back.”

Ten minutes later, Jake and Rick were heaving at the edges of the slab with the help of several others. It was hard work. The stone had lain there long and was heavy. They wedged several of the bars between the slab and the stone walls, using the first step as leverage. In that manner they managed to get enough torque to snap the stone from its seal. They slid the stone far enough to the side to leave an opening wide enough to admit a man. The stairs below were clearly revealed. They could see that the steps descended about twenty feet, then stopped at the opening of another tunnel.

Jake was preparing to go down to investigate when Rick caught his arm. “Should we be going down there?” he asked.

“Sure. How the hell else are we going to find out what it is?” Jake’s eyes gleamed. Visions of dark caverns and secret chambers danced in the back of his mind.

That frightened look was back on Rick’s face. “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea, Jake. We don’t know how safe the tunnel is or what it might have been constructed for. For all you know it might be the gravesite of one of Blake’s ancestors. I don’t think the old man would appreciate you poking around in the family crypt.”

Jake remembered his initial reaction to the stone, and a chill raced through him.What if it is a crypt? Does that make any difference? If I am going to finish the job, I’ll have to discover what lies below and relay that information to Blake. I can’t very well go to him and say we stopped working in the cellar because we found a hole in the floor. Blake would be furious. He’ll at least need a valid reason for the delay. He explained as much to Rick, who shrugged and reluctantly agreed, but the troubled look never left his foreman’s face. Jake knew Rick was just going along because Jake was the boss.Well, so be it then, he thought.That’s the way it is. Jake turned back toward the steps before him and forgot what Rick was feeling, caught up as he was in the excitement of exploring the unknown. Jake gingerly rested one foot on the top step, checking that it would support his weight. Then he stepped down with trepidation, worried about booby traps and the entire structure’s stability. When nothing happened, he repeated the process, moving down onto the next step, then the next. Behind him, Rick picked up one of the crowbars and followed. After the first few steps Jake grew more confident and quickly descended to the bottom, where he waited for Rick to join him.

Together they shined their lights into the darkness of the tunnel ahead.

The passage extended directly ahead, farther than the beams of their flashlights would reach. Jake felt his excitement rise as he stared down the tunnel.

The air was dry but cold, and Jake was thankful for the sweatshirt he’d donned before heading out the door. He set off down the tunnel, with Rick close behind. The tunnel continued for several hundred yards. About halfway down its length, it began to rise gradually toward the surface.

Eventually, their lights revealed a ninety-degree turn. When they reached it, Jake hesitated a moment, wondering what he might find around that corner. A strange feeling of unease suddenly crept over him, and the walls seemed to be closing in. He was struck by the urge to turn around and get out of the tunnel as fast as he could. He was about to tell Rick they were turning back when his good sense reasserted itself.Go back now? a voice whispered in his mind derisively.Just because of a little claustrophobia? I’ve come this far. I might as well see what’s on the other side.

No sooner had Jake convinced himself to keep going than Rick spoke up in a slightly quavering voice, “Jake? Don’t you think we should wait until…”

Jake wasn’t listening.

Intent on what lay ahead, he stepped around the corner.

The tunnel ended some three feet ahead in a perfectly laid wall of brick.

“What the hell?” Jake stepped forward and slapped the wall with his hand. A flat sound reached his ears in response.

When Rick caught up, Jake said, “Give me that crowbar, will you?”

Rick handed Jake the crowbar and watched as Jake took a step back and swung the bar at the wall. It rebounded off the surface and nearly struck Jake in the face, but he seemed not to notice. He stepped up and put his ear against the wall, listening.

A frown crossed his face.

He stepped back and swung again.

“Hear that?” he asked.

Rick shook his head.

“There’s an echo,” Jake told him. He struck the wall again, harder. This time, Rick also heard the echo.

“I think there’s a room on the other side of this wall.”

By then Rick was also getting caught up in the excitement of discovery. “Want me to have the jackhammer brought down?” he asked.

Jake absently handed the crowbar back to Rick as he considered his next move. More than anything, he wanted to do what his foreman had suggested. He knew that he shouldn’t, however. There could be a good reason the area had been sealed off. He didn’t want to put anyone in danger.

He decided it would be best if he checked with Blake first.

Jake let Rick know of his decision, and the two men returned the way they had come.

Leaving Rick to dismiss the men for the day, Jake headed back to his trailer. Excitement or not, he still had a deskful of paperwork that needed to be finished before he could call it a day.

Much to his dismay, he found he couldn’t concentrate on the work before him. His thoughts kept returning to the stone, and the tunnel it had concealed. Again and again, he found himself asking the same question.

What is behind that wall?

In the darkness, he stirred.

At first, there was just a vague feeling of confusion. Confusion a child might feel when waking in a strange room in the middle of the night; yet what was waking here was anything but a child. Against the disorientation, he fought to hold on to his dreams. Though dreams were but a poor substitute for reality, they were all he had. His only companions. To anyone else, they would have been nightmares; dark visions of death, gloriously colored with the rich crimson flash of freshly spilled blood. They were his link to life, his last toehold on the edge of sanity. Without dreams he would long ago have succumbed to the fate that his enemy had planned. But then, like now, his desire for life had been too strong. Long ago, when he’d first felt the crushing bonds of his prison, when he’d first recognized the true nature of his imprisonment, he’d retreated into the cold embrace of the darkness that surrounded him. He surrendered himself to his dreams, finding in them the sanctuary he needed to survive. Over time, he’d forgotten what was real and what was not, the line between illusion and reality blurring. He’d come to see his dreams not as a mere reflection of reality but the very image itself.

Then, as the first faint tugs of reality prodded his consciousness, he fought against them, not yet ready to relinquish that which had kept him safe from the hateful silence and despair that had surrounded him for so long.

Then, like the slow trickle of a muddy stream, he began to remember.

Sights and sounds and images from days that had long since fallen into dust came to him, fragments of a time forever frozen in the depths of his mind.

Memory returned.

He awoke.

He moved to leave his prison, only to find that his sentence had not ended, but had merely been exchanged for another.

He screamed then, a long, howling cry that would have been awful to hear had there been a throat from which it could have issued forth, a cry filled with such rage and frustration that it would have turned the listener’s blood to ice and bones to stone, had it been possible to hear.

In the midst of that cry, another memory surfaced.

The image of a face formed in the darkness of his mind. The face of one he had known long ago, the face of the one who had imprisoned him in the darkness of eternity, the one who had brought him such misery and pain.

The face of his enemy.

Cold, reptilian reason took over then, strangling his silent cry, shoving aside his emotions. A calculated cunning immediately set to pondering his current situation.

Summoning his strength from somewhere deep inside, he sent out his newly regained senses and discovered something more.

Men were near.

He could sense them, could hear the clank of their tools and the sounds of their voices. He could feel the minute vibrations that descended through the earth each time they moved above him.

For the first time in countless ages, he began to hope that he might soon be free. Once he was, nothing would stop him from having revenge on the one who had imprisoned him.

Exerting himself, he cast his consciousness out farther, past the walls of his prison, across the fields just beyond, among the living. Searching, seeking, briefly touching the minds of all he encountered before moving on, jumping from one to the next… until, at last, strength deserting him, his consciousness rushed back like the snap of an overstretched rubber band.

But in that last instant, he’d found him.

His enemy was old now, old and frail, no longer the awesome force that had once defeated him in battle. His foe’s powers had waned; the man’s body had grown feeble with age.

Having expended what little strength he’d had, the beast slipped back into the restless edge of sleep.

Yet this time, he remained aware.

And in the depths of his inhuman mind, a plan began to form.

2

LEGENDS

Fingers flying across the keyboard, Samuel Travers watched the words appear in neat lines of glowing green script on the screen in front of him with a deep sense of satisfaction.

He’d been writing since nine o’clock that morning, a steady five hours of work. At first it had been difficult, every sentence leaving him unsatisfied. Nothing seemed to fit, nothing had sounded quite right. The first half hour had been completely wasted, with nothing to show for it but half a pack of cigarette butts in the ashtray beside him. In desperation he’d tried an old writing exercise, copying names out of a phone book to stimulate creativity, and suddenly the words he’d been trying to summon together with such difficulty moments before had flashed into his mind as clearly as if they’d been etched in stone. He’d given a whoop of delight, swept the phone book onto the floor with a swing of one arm, and plunged into his tale with reckless abandon.

For the last four hours, his mind racing, his fingers trying desperately to keep pace with his thoughts, he’d been too absorbed in the crystal story line that was flowing out of his head to pay attention to anything else.

The creative stream was finally starting to wind down. The flood had become a weak trickle, and he knew it wouldn’t be much longer before even that went dry.

It was just about time to call it quits for the day.

What he had written that day was good.Damn good, he thought.Now if I can only keep it up until it’s finished. Taking a long drag off his cigarette, he cast a silent prayer to the Nine Muses to let him do just that.

Tipping the scales somewhere around 170, Sam stood just under six feet, with short curly hair the color of used motor oil that was slowly receding across his brow and eyes. Sam had taken the less traveled road after college, going to work as a writer for a company that produced fantasy role-playing games. Having been in love with the strange and fantastic for as long as he could remember, the job allowed him to stay in a world where demons, ghosts, and things that go bump in the night were a reality, at least on paper. While enjoyable, the job didn’t pay that well, so Sam was forced to supplement his income with a second job at a nursing home in Glendale.

As he sat staring at the pages of the fantasy tale he was in the midst of writing, his thoughts turned to the latest session of Swords and Sorcerers that he had scheduled for Jake and Katelynn later that night. It had been a week since his friends had ventured into that underground maze beneath Zolthane Mountain that Sam, the adventure’s writer, had created and named the Crystal Caverns. Katelynn and Jake often acted as an unofficial test group, working through his latest creations for their strengths and weaknesses before Sam sent them off to his editor for production. As usual, Sam was anxious to return to that fantasy world of imagination. Last week had seen Chelmar the Wizard and Alganea the Warrior-Maiden trapped in a dead-end cavern by a pack of flesh-hungry ghouls. Despite the week they’d had to ponder the problem, Sam still couldn’t see how Jake and Katelynn were going to get their characters out of their deadly predicament.

Looks like you might’ve made this one just a hair too difficult,he thought to himself.If they can’t find their way out of the maze, you’re going to have a lot of rewriting to do.

A quick glance at his watch told him it was just after two. He was working a rare day shift that provided the perfect opportunity to take Katelynn to work with him that afternoon so that she could interview Gabriel Armadorian, one of the nursing home’s patients and Sam’s friend, for her thesis. Knowing he had to be there by three-thirty, Sam decided he had just enough time to grab a quick shower and a bite to eat before going to pick up Katelynn. He saved the fresh text he’d written on his computer, then wandered into the kitchen, trying to hunt up the fixings for a sandwich or two, his thoughts wandering through the details of that night’s adventure.

He didn’t know it then, but before the night was through, Sam would find himself wrapped up a situation beyond his control, one that would make those he faced in the twilight realm of his imagination seem positively dull in comparison.

Across town, Katelynn Riley was anxiously awaiting her friend’s arrival. As was her habit when nervous, she checked through her book bag once more, assuring herself that she had everything she needed.

Notebook? Check.

Pencils and pens? Check.

Tape recorder? Check.

Tapes and extra batteries, just in case? Check.

That’s everything,she thought with satisfaction, and relaxed back into the chair by the front window, where she sat watching for Sam’s car. He had promised to take her to St. Boniface’s today when he went in for his shift, to introduce her to Gabriel Armadorian, the nursing home’s oldest patient. He had assured her that the old man was still lucid and in complete possession of his mental faculties.

From the comments that Sam had made, Katelynn was fairly certain that Gabriel was privy to a good deal of information that she was unable to find elsewhere on Sebastian Blake, the man who was the subject of her thesis. She was eager to sit down with Gabriel to discuss the issue at length. What a coup it would be for her to uncover and support information that not even Dr. Hemington, her mentor, had previously seen.

A horn sounded from outside, snatching her from her musings. Seeing Sam’s car in the drive, she quickly slipped into her coat, snatched up her pack, and hustled out the door.

“All set?” Sam asked, as she settled into the passenger seat.

“Sure am. Thanks a lot for this, Sam.” She leaned over and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek.

He smiled at her in return. The two had known each other for several years, having enrolled at Benton University at the same time. A chance introduction had blossomed into a deep friendship that had lasted well past college. At times Sam found himself wondering just why it was that they’d never been more than just friends.Wasn’tfriendship one of the most important pillars in the foundation of a relationship? It wasn’t that he didn’t find her attractive; he certainly did. She kept herself in shape with daily workouts of swimming and aerobics, toning her body without losing its soft feminine curves. Her hair was the color of chestnuts and curled at the shoulders. Katelynn had a wonderful laugh, a beautiful smile, and a pert little nose that reminded him of an elf. Sam knew from past experience that she was kind, caring, and generous.So why hadn’t they fallen in love? Sam figured it was just one of the great mysteries in life and left it at that. Sometimes it didn’t pay to look too closely at such things. They were friends, and that was what was important. At least that was what he told himself.

Suddenly, Katelynn interrupted his thoughts. “Tell me about Gabriel, Sam.”

He thought about it for a moment, then said with a laugh, “I’m not sure I can.”

Despite all the time they’d spent together, Gabriel was still pretty much an enigma to him. He had the feeling that the old man would remain that way no matter how well they got to know each other.

Sam remembered the day they had admitted Gabriel to the nursing home. The stretcher attendants were wheeling him in, his stroke too recent for him to be mobile, and as they’d passed the nursing desk were Sam was stationed for the night, the old man had opened his eyes, looked at him, and said, “Come pay me a visit sometime, Sammy. I think we’ve got a lot to talk about.” It had taken Sam a minute or two to get over his shock, and by then the group had passed through the double doors and down the hall to the guest rooms. He’d wondered how the old man had known his name, then decided he’d simply read it off his name tag. But when he’d been changing in the locker room after his shift, he’d discovered he’d forgotten to put his tag on that night. There it was, sitting right where he’d left it the night before, on the top shelf of his locker, the white letters of his name staring him in the face. Once the shivers had gone away, he’d convinced himself that one of the attendants must have been playing a joke on him. Knowing his interest in the supernatural, they’d convinced the patient to go along and try to give Sam a scare. He’d had to admit it had worked beautifully, and left it at that. But he hadn’t forgotten the incident all weekend, and when he went back to work the following week he did just what the man had asked, paid him a visit.

From that night on, the two of them had been friends.

Knowing Katelynn was patiently waiting for some kind of answer, he struggled to describe how he felt whenever he was in Gabriel’s presence.

“You ever notice how they portray grandfathers on television? Nice old guys who always have the right answer, who can always give the kid who’s the star of the show the right piece of advice?”

Katelynn nodded. She knew exactly what Sam was talking about; her own grandfather had been just like that. He’d always known when something was bothering her and managed to cheer her up with just a few words. When he died a few years ago, she thought she’d never be able to stop crying.

“Well, that’s Gabriel. He makes me feel like a kid all over again, awed and amazed at everything he says. He can take an everyday object and turn it into something miraculous, just by having you look at it in a different way.” He grinned sheepishly. “Sounds pretty corny, doesn’t it?”

“Not at all. Keep going.”

“He seems ancient to me. Totally at one with nature and the world around him, peaceful, serene, as if nothing could ever faze him. And he’s an incredible storyteller. Sometimes, when I’m working the late shift and he can’t sleep, I’ll sit in his room and he’ll tell me old legends, tales filled with wonder and magic, good and evil, tragedy and happiness.”

They left the town limits and headed west on Route 3, heading down the side of a mountain to where Glendale lay at the base, fifteen minutes away. They crossed the covered bridge that spanned the Quinnepeg River, and a few moments later drove into the town of Glendale. It was bigger and more industrial than Harrington Falls, less quaint and more seedy. St. Boniface’s, the nursing home where Sam was employed, was on the far side of town, and it took them another fifteen minutes of fighting the afternoon traffic before they arrived.

Once inside, Sam had Katelynn wait in the lobby while he ran downstairs to the locker room, changed into his uniform, and clocked in his time card. When he returned he led her upstairs to the third floor. Mr. Armadorian was in Room 310, at the end of a long L-shaped corridor.

Outside the door, Sam said, “I told him you were coming, but just in case he’s asleep, why don’t you wait here a sec and let me go in alone.”

Katelynn nodded and stepped back to comply, but a voice called out to them from inside the room. “Are you two going to stand out there all day, or are you coming in to keep an old man company?”

Sam grinned, shrugged his shoulders, and led Katelynn inside.

The first thing Katelynn noticed were his eyes. A clear robin’s-egg shade of blue, they seemed to gaze out at her with the open wonder of a child. They were eyes she’d often read about but never actually encountered—mesmerizing eyes, eyes that seemed to see right through a person. If not for the obvious kindness that poured out of them in waves, their impact would have been quite frightening. As they were, they made her feel warm and welcome.

Once she could tear her gaze away from Gabriel’s, she noticed his skin was a burnished shade of copper, his face so lined with cracks and creases that it reminded her of a well-worn piece of leather. His hair was long and white, flowing over his shoulders in a long snowy mane, receding only a little despite his obvious age. He smiled at her scrutiny. “Sammy,” he said, reaching out and clasping his friend’s hand in greeting with both of his own, “I’ve been waiting for you, just like we agreed.” Gabriel let go and turned to face Katelynn. “And this must be the young lady my friend has been telling me about lately.”

“Katelynn Riley,” she told him, turning to shake hands. His hand was thin and seemed fragile, but his skin was rough with years of hard work, and his grip was still surprisingly strong. She noticed that he was dressed in a pair of faded jeans and a blue chambray shirt that hung loosely on his thin frame. His feet, propped up on the end of the bed, were clad in a pair of soft suede moccasins.

“Please, sit with me, here by the window,” he said, indicating several chairs that had been set up by the sliding glass door leading out to the balcony that formed most of the wall in front of the bed. “I was just enjoying the warmth of the afternoon sun.”

Having been there countless times, Sam had already taken a seat, but Katelynn paused a moment to look around, taking in the austerity of the man’s living space. She had glanced into several other rooms on the way up, and she knew that this was not the normal decor. The only furniture in the room besides the bed and chairs was a nightstand that appeared to have been hewed by hand from one solid piece of wood. It was rough and unfinished, but its very simplicity seemed to give it a wholesomeness that a perfectly stained piece would never have possessed. The walls were plain white plaster, unpainted, unadorned except for an intricate macramé piece that looked to her like some kind of bird rising out of a fire.

When she turned away from the wall hanging, Katelynn found Gabriel watching her. She smiled shyly, and he gestured with one hand, indicating with a smile of his own that she should join Sam and him at the window. The three of them sat together in silence for a time, letting the heat of the sun warm the chill from their bones. Eventually, Gabriel turned to her, and said, “Sammy thinks that I may be of some help to you?”

“Yes,” she replied eagerly, leaning forward in her chair, anxious to get down to business. “I’m employed as a teaching assistant while I work toward my doctorate in sociology at Benton University. I’ve been doing a thesis on the dynamics of communities that arise from one central, familial influence. The impact of the Blake family fortune on the rise of Harrington Falls has been a perfect model. Sam tells me that your family had some association with the Blakes in the past, and I thought you might have some information that might add some local color to my work.”

He nodded, a curious expression on his face. “I’d be delighted to help if I can, but most of what I know would be second- or thirdhand information.”

“That won’t be a problem. I’ve been focusing lately on the figure of Sebastian Blake, including the circumstances that surrounded his final disappearance from this area. Anything you can tell me about him would be a great help, since I’ve managed to uncover next to nothing.” As she spoke, Katelynn delved into her bag for her notebook and pen, while at the same time surreptitiously turning on her tape recorder. She left the recorder inside the bag so as not to make Gabriel uncomfortable. When she straightened, she found the atmosphere in the room had changed, the air suddenly charged with tension. The old man was staring at her intently, a strange look on his face. She could feel that his expression was one of fear.

“Why would a pretty young woman like you want to know about a man like him?” Gabriel asked in a soft, quiet voice that somehow carried far more force than his earlier exuberance.

A sudden thrill went through Katelynn, the one that told her she was onto something.Easy, girl, she told herself, not wanting to ruin things by being hasty. Mindful of the old man’s reaction, she answered carefully, “Well, the Blake family has had a tremendous effect on the development of this region. Since so much has been done on the other, more notable members of the family, particularly Elijah and Nathaniel, I wanted to stay away from them and choose a lesser-known figure. My early research uncovered very little information on Sebastian, Elijah’s younger brother, and so I decided to find out why. The more I looked, the less I found and the more curious I became.”

“And now, like a child with a lost treasure map, you just can’t seem to put it down,” Gabriel said gently, almost remorsefully, in reply.

She nodded in agreement.

He turned away, staring off into space, as if considering whether or not he was going to help her. His hands, idle until then, were suddenly in motion as he began wringing them together in an outward expression of some internal conflict. That went on for several long moments as Katelynn and Sam sat holding their breaths wondering what had so upset the man. Finally, he seemed to return to himself and looked over at them. Turning to Sam, he said, “Shut the door, Sammy.”

Katelynn watched as Sam complied, and on his face she could see an expression of bewilderment that probably matched her own. Her feeling of excitement was growing. The old man was acting as if he was about to impart national security secrets, and that could only mean that he knew something good.

Gabriel waited until Sam had resumed his seat, then addressed Katelynn. “There is no way I can turn you from this course and suggest you choose another?”

Katelynn shook her head.I’ve done too much work now as it is, spent too many hours combing dusty works in the back shelves of the library, all to no avail. Now, when I finally stumble onto something, he wants me to give it up? Not a chance!

He nodded again, as if her answer was what he had expected. “Tell me what you know,” he said.

Katelynn took a deep breath to hide her excitement, and began. “Besides the general facts like his parentage and where he was educated, not much. I do know that he was a loner, almost the exact opposite of his brother Elijah, and he got into trouble with the authorities on more than one occasion while he was growing up. He left Harrington Falls to attend school in Boston and spent many years overseas.”

“Sounds fairly normal to me,” Sam said.

“To an extent,” Katelynn agreed. “He returned some years later a changed man, however. The wild attitude of his childhood had been replaced by an intense studiousness that seemed to please everyone. He’s mentioned several times in historical documents of various types after his return, attending a town meeting here, appearing at a dinner engagement there, just as you would expect of a wealthy member of one of the town’s founding families. But soon after that, the world seems to have lost track of him. Right up until the spring of 1760 he’s a fairly prominent figure, but then there’s nothing. After 1760, there isn’t a single mention of him anywhere I looked.” She sighed in exasperation.

“The various family histories seem to ignore the question of what happened to him as well. I couldn’t even find a record of his death.”

Unconsciously, she shivered. “It’s as if he fell off the face of the earth, and no one noticed that he was gone.”

Next to them, Sam listened to her litany, fascinated. It was all news to him. He’d heard the man’s name mentioned once or twice in the past and seemed to remember something about there once having been a statue of him in the town square that had been torn down for some reason. He was beginning to feel the same sense of mystery that had infected Katelynn.

It was obvious that Gabriel was troubled by what she was saying. Sam had known the man too long not to recognize the subtle clues—the changed look down in the depths of his eyes, the nervous tic in his little finger. He was upset, and for a moment Sam was certain he wouldn’t tell them anything. Then Gabriel turned and looked out the window, gathering his thoughts. Sam had seen the same expression whenever the old man was getting ready to tell one of his tales of the mystical past.

“Sebastian Blake,” Gabriel said softly, as if tasting the words on the tip of his tongue and finding them bitter. “I haven’t thought of him in many years. And with good reason; he was not the type of man one allows into his thoughts lightly.” He turned to face them, and they both saw that a sadness had descended over him, a blanket of weighted sorrow that for the first time made him seem old in spirit as well as body.

He went on, “The natives of this country believe that when the Great Spirit made this world, he populated it with many strange and wondrous creatures, some good, some bad. One of these was Coyote.”

Katelynn glanced over at Sam, and by the look on her face he could tell she was wondering what on earth the old man’s words had to do with Sebastian Blake. Gabriel had his own way of telling a tale, and Sam had learned long before that it was no use trying to hurry him along. He’d tell it his way, in his own good time, and that was that. Besides, Sam reflected, he always said things for a specific reason, and what at first seemed trivial was often important later in the tale. He calmed her with a subtle motion of his hands.

Gabriel was still speaking, and Sam refocused his attention. “Coyote is one of the great spirits of the Indians. According to legend, he taught man many things—the use of clay to make pots, the way to make mats from the reeds that grew by the river’s edge. The arts and crafts of the People that have been preserved from the beginnings have all been taught to them by Coyote, according to their beliefs. Yet, Coyote had two faces, and it wasn’t long before the People realized this. At heart he was a bullying, greedy trickster. He would roam among the People in a form none could see, and he would wreak havoc whenever he found the opportunity.”

Gabriel looked directly into Katelynn’s eyes, and for a moment she was frightened of the old man, so forceful was the strength of his gaze. “The man you speak of was much the same way, but it took those who lived beside him much longer to recognize him for what he truly was.”

It took her a moment, but she at last found her voice. “So he wasn’t the Mr. Nice Guy that he appeared to be when he returned from Europe?”

“Outwardly, he was. But it’s not what a man is on the outside that defines his essential nature, but what he is in here”—one long thin finger touched the center of his chest—“that makes him who he is. In the heart of Sebastian Blake, there was nothing but darkness.”

The sun went behind a cloud then, as if echoing Gabriel’s words. Sam was struck by the uncomfortable feeling that it was hiding, not wanting its precious light to be sullied by what they were saying. The old man must have felt it, too, for he looked toward the sky and nodded, as if the sun’s behavior was entirely appropriate to the moment.

“My great-grandfather used to speak of him when I was a boy, passing on tales he had learned from his father before him. A wise man was my great-grandfather, wiser than I can ever hope to be, I suspect. From him I learned many things about the true nature of the world. But of everything he ever taught me, the most important was this: Evil walks in the world, under many faces and many forms, in sunlight or in darkness.” His gaze lost its focus, as if he had turned it inward, down a road neither of them could see. “I don’t think I ever really understood what he meant, until I met Sebastian Blake.”

The last was said in a near whisper, and it took a moment for Katelynn to realize just what it was that he had said. When she did, she spoke without thinking. “Oh, come on! Met him? That would mean you’d have to be over three hundred years old!”

The tone of her voice brought Gabriel out of his reminiscing with a start. He appeared confused for a moment, then smiled gently. “A figure of speech, of course. Knowing about him was as close as I would ever want to come to meeting him, I assure you.” His grin widened, and he winked at her. “Then again, maybe I am over three hundred years old. But I bet I don’t look a day over seventy-five, right?”

Katelynn grinned back to acknowledge the joke, and relaxed. For a minute she’d feared the old man wasn’t nearly as lucid as he seemed.

“Blake was a man who searched for forbidden learnings, for knowledge that was best left far from the eyes and ears of man. Instead of embracing the philosophies and teachings that had brought man out of the Dark Ages and into the modern world, he sought after ancient beliefs and legends, delving into areas of darkness, seeking the company of the Dark Ones.”

“You mean the Devil?” Sam asked excitedly.

Katelynn cast him a sour look. She was there to do some serious research for her thesis, and she didn’t want to waste time indulging Sam’s love of the fantastic. If he wanted to think that devils and demons and things with a thousand legs haunted the dark and forgotten places of the world, that was fine, but she didn’t want it interfering with what she’d come to accomplish.

He didn’t seem to notice her look, and neither did Gabriel, for he turned to reply to the question.

“Not exactly, Sam. At least not in the way that you mean. You’ve got to remember that this was in the early days of this settlement. The people who had come here had fled the Old Country out of a desire to escape religious persecution. For them, belief in God and the Devil was not just something to indulge in when they felt like it, as so many of today’s religions have become. For them, it was a question of eternal salvation or damnation. But Blake wasn’t interested in that limited view of the universe. He looked beyond that, to an older and darker view of the universe, and sought to recapture the power that the ancients supposedly had through their rituals and ceremonies.”

Katelynn interrupted him before he could go any further in his explanation. “Wait a minute!” she said sharply, her mild irritation at Sam’s question having rapidly grown into annoyance with Gabriel’s response to it. “Are you trying to tell us that Sebastian Blake practiced witchcraft?”

“Dark Magic might be a more appropriate term for it, but yes, that is what I am telling you,” he answered simply, the congenial expression never leaving his face.

“Cool!” Sam exclaimed happily. When he’d agreed to bring Katelynn in to see Gabriel, he’d expected to sit through a long conversation about a guy who’d long since turned to dust and who’d led a life so boring that no one even remembered him. Now all of a sudden they were talking about something that was right up his alley—a real, live warlock, right in his own town!

Katelynn, however, was far from thrilled at the news. “I’m sorry, but I just can’t believe that,” she said.

“Why not?” Gabriel asked, a playful smile on his lips and a twinkle in his eye.

His expression just served to aggravate Katelynn further. He was a nice old man, and probably pretty lonely most of the time. That was why he liked making up stories to tell Sam while Sam worked the late shift, only the two of them awake so late at night. He’d probably misunderstood how serious she was, and having no real information that could help, had decided to invent some story along the lines of the ones he told Sam, thinking that was what she wanted to hear. She’d come looking for solid leads to help her, and talk of rituals and black magic was just going to put her in a foul mood. How gullible did he think she was?

“Why don’t I believe it?” she answered him, the smile on her face as false as a three-dollar bill. “I’ll tell you why I don’t believe it. Because there is no such thing as black magic.”

“Are you so sure of that, Katelynn? Has someone actually proven that such a thing does not exist?”

“Of course not. No reputable scientist would bother with such an experiment. The idea of magic completely defies what we know of modern physics. It just can’t happen.”

“Ahh, but remember what we are talking about here. We’re not discussing modern ideas of reality but the views of those people who created this town in the late 1600s. Belief in witchcraft was a way of life back then, and in just about every small town you could find some man or woman who was considered a witch or warlock. Having those individuals run out of town or put to death by angry mobs in the middle of the night was not uncommon, especially here in the backwoods of New England. Just look at Salem. Do you really think these people didn’t believe in magic?”

Grudgingly, Katelynn had to admit that he was right. When delving into the past, one had to remember that modern beliefs and attitudes just didn’t belong. You had to adopt the beliefs of that particular era, or you would arrive at incorrect conclusions, just as she was doing now.But what did all this have to do with Blake?

Gabriel was more than happy to let her know. “Blake believed that he could gain power through the use of black magic, and much of his public demeanor was just an act, designed to deceive the townspeople into accepting him back into the fold while his research went on behind their backs. He scoured every reference he could find, tome after tome after tome, searching for just the right ritual that would put him in touch with the dark entities he believed existed amongst us, hoping to make use of their power to elevate himself into a position of dominance in the community.”

“Then, in the early months of 1762, the killings began. The townspeople at first thought they were accidents, for they had been cleverly disguised as such. A wagon accident here, a sudden fall from a horse there, a child lost in the woods and found frozen to death the next day. But as the year passed, the killings became more frequent. And more violent. Random accidents could no longer account for what was happening, and the ravaged conditions of the corpses made the people begin to suspect that something out of the ordinary was going on. Then, late in 1763, the killer was discovered.”

Katelynn was listening with a skeptical look on her face, but Sam was completely engrossed in Gabriel’s tale, his belief in every word etched clearly on his face.

“An anonymous tip sent the local authorities to a small shack on the woods of the Blake family estate, and there they discovered Sebastian in the midst of one of his foul rituals. A small child was laid out on an altar before him as some kind of sacrifice to the powers with whom he had fallen in league. Before their very eyes, he plunged a knife into the young one’s chest and cut out his living heart.”

The old man shuddered, and Katelynn found herself involuntarily responding in kind. One thing she had to give him credit for; Gabriel was a great storyteller. Whether what he had to say had any basis in fact was another issue altogether.

“The townsfolk saw no need to wait for a formal trial. They formed a lynch mob and hanged him on the spot.”

“So how come there is no record of any of this?” Katelynn asked, trying to trip the man up.

He had an answer ready for that as well. “Not wanting to besmirch the Blake family name, or to create a reputation for their newly prospering town, the village elders agreed to wipe any reference of the event from the records and forbade the papers from printing anything concerning the story, which wasn’t difficult because they were owned by the Blakes.”

“So how am I going to prove that this actually occurred?” she asked him.

Gabriel sat back and spread his hands, palms up. “I don’t know. You’re going to have to figure that one out for yourself. I’ve told you all that I know.”

Throughout the story Sam had been quiet, but he finally spoke. “They couldn’t have gotten to everyone, Katelynn. There’s bound to be someone who recorded the events. A merchant, or a traveling minister, maybe even one of the families of the victims. At the very least you should be able to document the number of deaths that occurred at that time, right?”

Katelynn thought about it for a moment, then agreed. The town records, if they were still around, should show the death certificates for those years. If she could substantiate the deaths, she might be able to find another lead to help her prove the rest. She smiled to herself, surprised that she was seriously considering the story she’d just heard. The idea that Blake was consorting with the Devil was absurd, but proving the man had been some kind of a serial killer was not beyond her ability.

She focused her attention back on Gabriel. “Could you tell me any more about the people who were murdered?” she asked hopefully.

The well of information that Gabriel seemed to possess had apparently run dry. He didn’t know the names of any of the victims, or the dates on which they had been killed. Nothing except for the fact that it had started in early 1762 and ended in late 1763. “I’m sorry I can’t help you more,” he said.

“Oh, that’s okay. You’ve given me a beginning, anyway. I’m not saying I believe it, but maybe it’s worth looking into.”

He smiled at her, and she gave him one of her own, the skepticism she’d felt earlier in the conversation having dissipated.

They chatted for a few minutes more, then said their good-byes. Sam had to start his shift, and Katelynn had to prepare a lesson for the class she was teaching in the morning. They told Gabriel they’d be back to see him soon and stepped out into the hallway.

“What do you think, Katelynn?” Sam asked, as they headed for the nursing station at the other end of the hall where he was assigned for the duration of his shift. “Do you think he was telling the truth?”

“I don’t know, Sam. It could be that this guy actually was running around, sacrificing people in the mistaken belief that it could give him supernatural powers. It was the eighteenth century, after all. Then again, Gabriel could’ve just been making it all up in an effort to please you. It’s obvious that he likes you, and if he felt that was the type of story you were looking for, he might just do it. He’s certainly intelligent enough to pull it off.”

“I don’t know, Katelynn. Gabriel’s never lied to me before, and he certainly understood how important this is to you.”

“Only time will tell. Maybe I’ll turn something up with a little more research. In the meantime, I’d better get going.”

Sam handed over the car keys. “Pick me up at nine, and we’ll drive to Jake’s together, okay?”

“Sure thing. See you then,” she replied, and headed off down the hall, throwing one last smile in Sam’s direction to show that she didn’t think the whole afternoon had been wasted.

Sam grinned in return and turned back to begin the day’s work, but his mind was on that long forgotten evening in 1763.

At the other end of the hall, the one calling himself Gabriel sat staring into the distance, his eyes unfocused and dreamy. The voice of the beast was in the back of his mind, as it had been throughout the interview, whispering to him all the awful ends it had devised for him in its long years of confinement. It had been easier to ignore it when he had his two young friends in the room to talk to, taking his mind off what the beast was saying, but with them gone, it was harder to shut it out. He listened closely for a moment, trying to gauge if it had grown any stronger; but being unable to do so, he tuned it out. He didn’t want to listen to that vile voice any longer.

He was worried. He was no longer the man he’d once been. His power was waning quickly; his body at last had grown old and tired. He’d assumed the Nightshade’s prison would hold him indefinitely, but in that he’d been wrong. He should never have had that much pride in his own abilities. The beast was awake, and before long he knew it would be free as well.

Then it would come for him.

He had no doubts as to what would happen when it did.

He had one last hope, however. The seeds of his plan had already been planted. Sam was a good listener, and mixed within the stories he had been telling were grains of truth. He trusted that the boy would be smart enough to tell one from the other when the time was right.

The girl was a different story. He could tell she was skeptical of the tale he had told, and it would be questionable whether she would be able to overcome that skepticism in time to help Sam with what needed to be done. But overcome it she must, for Sam could not face this evil alone.

Gabriel decided to nudge her along the right path.

Rising from his bed, he crossed to the dresser and opened the bottom drawer. Beneath several old sweaters was a locked strongbox. He removed the box and placed it on top of the dresser.

Inside were the odds and ends that he had accumulated over the years; mementos of special moments and personal interests. One of these was a necklace of gold from which hung a crimson stone, wrapped in a piece of soft cloth. It had been fashioned years before by his enemy’s ally, and Gabriel had taken possession of it following his victory over them. It was a communication device of sorts, for the right kind of individual, and Gabriel had little doubt that Katelynn fit the mold.

Gabriel reached for the phonebook and determined Katelynn’s address. He then called a courier service, with whom he made arrangements to have the necklace picked up and delivered.

If he was right, it wouldn’t be long before Katelynn was involved in his plan whether she wanted to be or not.

It was unfair, but necessary.

With each passing day the beast was growing stronger, coming that much closer to escaping.

Gabriel knew it would not be long.

His task finished, he began to pray.

3

BLAKE

As Jake drove his Jeep along the winding road that led from the tall iron gates marking the entrance of the Riverwatch estate to the mansion itself, he glanced out over the lake to his left. The beauty of the setting sun as it reflected off the still waters had not lost its appeal in the years since he’d first seen it.

He had arrived in Harrington Falls five years earlier, after spending almost a decade in New York City. The romance of the metropolis had long since worn away by the time he’d made the decision to leave. He’d grown tired of the crowds; tired of the press of humanity on all sides; tired of the hectic pace. He needed a cleansing of the spirit that just wasn’t possible to find in the city, and one afternoon he decided he’d had enough. He sold almost everything he owned, packed his Jeep, and headed northeast. Eventually, he wandered into Harrington Falls and decided to stay.

He had accomplished a lot since then. With the help of a local bank, he started a construction company, finally putting the engineering degree he’d earned at NYU to good use. He started small, concentrating on additions to existing structures, home improvements, that sort of thing. After a time he discovered that he had a true talent, and interest, for restoring the older homes in the community, bringing them back to the vitality of their youth. He changed the focus of his business and now had a strong following in the surrounding communities. It was his success that brought him to the attention of his current client, Hudson Blake.

Blake was a direct descendant of the family that had started Harrington Falls in the late 1600s, a fact that he never let anyone forget. Jake had agreed to renovate one of the family mansions, a place known as Stonemoor. He knew the job would provide steady work for the rest of the fall and on into the winter, the period when available work usually became scarce.

Jake was beginning to regret that decision.

He hated the meetings with Blake. Held once a week, they were ostensibly to check the progress the crew was making on the renovations. Blake had always tried to make Jake feel inferior. The man was a pompous, condescending ass who wanted everything done yesterday and got verbally vicious when it wasn’t.

No, this is not going to be a fun meeting.

Jake pulled into the cul-de-sac at the end of the drive and parked beside a sleek, silver Rolls Royce, circa 1937. A wide brick walkway curved across the lawn to the main door of the mansion.

He picked up the door’s knocker, a heavy piece of brass molded into the shape of a lion’s head, and rapped it sharply three times.

A moment passed before the butler, Charles, opened the door. He glanced at Jake’s attire with clear disapproval. Jake was still wearing the jeans and work shirt he’d had on at the site. Coming across the threshold, Jake returned his best up yours stare, with a certain sense of satisfaction.

It was bad enough that he had to take such flak from Blake. Taking it from the man’s servant was just too much.

Without a word, Charles turned and led the way through the first floor until they reached a set of broad oak doors near the back of the house. Having been there before, Jake knew it was the library.

“Wait here a moment,” Charles said, in that toneless servant voice he had cultivated, and turned away without waiting for an acknowledgment. He knocked softly on the door in front of him before noiselessly sliding into the room. When he returned, he indicated Jake was to be admitted.

Jake stepped inside and heard the doors close firmly behind him.

Blake was seated at a desk formed from a massive piece of black stone that squatted in the middle of the room’s hardwood floor like an altar erected to some particularly vile god. He didn’t look up or acknowledge Jake’s presence in any way. He merely continued to read through the papers held up before him.

Instead of standing there and growing uncomfortable, which Jake knew was the purpose of this little “exercise,” he used the time to study his employer.

As always, whenever a few days had passed without seeing Blake, Jake was repulsed anew by the sight of his client. It wasn’t that he was physically disgusting; he didn’t have grotesquely scarred features, no loathsome birth defects that made looking at him a trial in itself. Nothing one could point to, and say, “There’s the problem.” Nothing like that. Instead, it was an odd sense of discomfort that crept into his bones, an unsettling feeling that slowly came over him. A feeling that said the heart at the center of this fruit was shrunken and black with rot. Add to that Blake’s long bony frame and small evil-looking eyes set in a ferretsharp face, and Jake figured it was pretty understandable that he felt the way he did.

Blake continued the charade for several long moments, letting the silence stretch.

Finally, “You’re late,” he said, in a tone that showed his own disgust, never once looking up at his visitor.

“I know,” Jake replied calmly.

Blake suddenly threw the papers onto the surface of the desk and Jake found himself staring into the man’s beady little eyes. “I suppose you have some kind of excuse?”

Jake still hadn’t been offered a seat. He knew he wouldn’t be. He chose to ignore the verbal gibe as well. “I’m afraid I have some bad news,” he answered instead. “I was forced to stop work in the cellar this afternoon because of something my workmen uncovered.”

The look changed in the man’s eyes as his words registered, and for just a moment Jake thought he saw a gleam of excitement there before his employer’s expression went carefully neutral.

“What do you mean?” Blake asked, his tone now as flat as his expression.

“After we finished pumping out the river, we uncovered the entrance to a set of stairs leading deeper underground. I went down with my foreman and followed the tunnel to a point some two hundred yards farther, where it has been bricked shut. I thought it was best if we waited to see what you wanted us to do before continuing.”

“I see….” Blake replied, then swung his chair around so he was facing the window, his back to Jake, so that the younger man wouldn’t see the wide smile of surprise that spread slowly across his face. “And what did you do then?”

“Nothing. I sent the boys home, locked up, and came on over here.”

“I see,” Blake responded again.

The silence stretched for an unusually long time, with Blake staring out the window lost in thought, and Jake reluctant to disturb him and break the man’s good mood, but finally, Jake felt that if he didn’t interrupt, they’d be here until Tuesday.

“Mr. Blake? What do you want me to do about it?”

“Hhmm? Oh, nothing. Nothing at all.”

The chair swung back around. Jake was unable to read anything behind the man’s carefully blank expression. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to think about this for a while before I come to any decisions. Why don’t you and your men take the next few days off?”

Then came the clincher.

“With pay, of course,” Blake said.

Jake couldn’t believe what he was hearing.Days off? With pay? Has somebody turned the world upside down and not told me? But Jake was nobody’s fool. Whether he believed that Blake was really being a nice guy or if he had ulterior motives, Jake knew not to look a gift horse in the mouth. He quickly agreed with the idea, left off the paperwork he’d been requested to bring, and made plans to get back in contact with the man before the end of the week. Then he got the hell out before Blake could change his mind.

A few days off?

Hell, yes. Sounds good to me.

Climbing into his Jeep, Jake finally allowed himself to grin at his good fortune.

Once the fool had gone, Blake let a triumphant smile emerge as he pondered the implications of the news. His ancestor’s journal had long hinted at a secret vault within one of the family estates, but after spending thousands of dollars and months of effort searching for it, he’d finally dismissed it several years ago as foolish nonsense.

Today’s news changed everything.

There was no sense putting himself at risk to be certain, however. He’d pretend to give the situation some thought, then call the young fool back later that night. He’d tell him he’d changed his mind and give him permission to investigate further.

His smile grew wider as he realized what he had hunted for for so long might at last be within reach.

Which wasn’t really all that surprising, by any means.

He was, after all, a Blake.

4

GAME NIGHT

Sam made a covert roll of his eight-sided die. Noting the result, he made an announcement to the players in front of him. “Five of the eight warriors you just killed suddenly sit back up and start rising to their feet.”

“I think we’re in trouble,” Jake said to Katelynn, who nodded her agreement. Turning to Sam, Jake said, “Chelmar steps back and prepares to cast a sleep spell.”

“Okay. And what about Alganea?”

“She stands a few feet in front of him, out of his line of sight but close enough to defend him if the things attack again.”

More dice tumble, and another grave pronouncement is made: “The first ghoul reaches his feet and turns his head in your direction. His eyes seem to glow when they see you, and he slowly begins lumbering toward you, the sword in his right hand raised overhead threateningly.”

“Hurry up, Jake!” Katelynn said excitedly.

“Okay, okay. Chelmar steps up next to Alganea and casts the spell, making sure before he does so that she is behind him and therefore out of the area of the spell’s effect.” Jake smiled at Katelynn winningly, as if to say that he had everything under control.

“Chelmar, you realize that you cast the spell properly, but it doesn’t seem to have any effect on the ghouls, who are in fact undead, and therefore are not affected by mortal requirements like sleep. The first ghoul is almost close enough to strike, and looking past his shoulder both of you can see that now the other four have also climbed to their feet and are starting to move in your direction.”

Both of the players knew that their characters were in real trouble. If they didn’t think of something soon, they would probably die there in the dark caverns beneath Zolthane Mountain.

It was just after 10:00P.M ., and the three friends were deep in the midst of a session of Swords and Sorcerers, testing Sam’s latest creation for playability. They were seated around the table in the kitchen of Jake’s apartment, with Sam on one side and Jake and Katelynn on the other, their books, papers, and charts spread out before them. The lights in the room were off, the only illumination coming from half a dozen candles that cast a reddish glow across their faces, adding to the atmosphere of the game.

Loki, Jake’s Akita, slept contentedly at his feet, head resting lightly on his paws, lost in his own fantasy world of dreams.

The game went on. “I reach out and yank Chelmar out of the range of the ghoul’s sword,” Katelynn said quickly in response to Sam as soon as she heard the magic had failed to work as they’d planned.

Another roll of the dice. “You manage to pull him back just in time, Alganea. But the ghouls close in.”

The game continued in that vein for another hour or so, with Katelynn and Jake managing to have their characters escape from the clutches of the ghouls, only to find themselves lost in the labyrinthine maze of passages that led them deeper beneath the earth, setting the stage for the next week’s adventure.

Jake had seemed distracted for most of the evening, and as they were cleaning up, Sam decided to broach the subject. Jake was staring off into space, absently stroking his dog’s head, when Sam said, “What’s up, Jake? You usually enjoy poking holes in all my hard work. Sometimes I feel that the only reason you play anymore is to make certain I don’t pull a fast one on the unsuspecting public. You’re letting Katelynn do all the work tonight.”

Jake laughed. “Sorry, Sam. Just distracted I guess. We had an incident at the site today, and I guess it’s been on my mind all night.”

He had both Sam and Katelynn’s attention instantly. “Somebody get hurt?” Katelynn asked, her face showing concern, the adventure module in her hand forgotten for the moment.

“Nah, nothing like that.” Remembering his first reaction to Rick’s appearance in his trailer, Jake almost smiled. “My men have been working in the cellar for the last several days, pumping out the river so we can lay the wood floor, you know?”

Sam and Katelynn nodded. Spending as much time together as they did, they’d become almost as familiar with Blake’s renovation plans as Jake.

“Once Rick’s team pumped out the water, they found this shallow trench bisecting the entire basement. And there, at the bottom of the trench, is a set of stairs leading down into the earth.” Jake looked up from where he was staring at the floor, to see if his friends were following his explanation.

They were, so he told them the rest.

About his gut reaction to the stone. About the tunnel he and Rick uncovered, and of the journey the two of them made into the darkness beneath. He told them of a phone call he had earlier that evening from Blake, and of the man’s request that he and his crew break through the barrier that blocked off the end of the tunnel in order to discover what lay beyond.

“What are you going to do?” Sam asked.

“Just what I was told to do. Break down that wall in the morning to see what’s on the other side.”

“Want some company?” Sam asked.

“Sure. Just come ready to work. Taking down a brick wall in open air in the light of day is one thing. Having to do the same while underground in a dimly lit and poorly ventilated tunnel is another. It isn’t going to be easy.”

Throughout the conversation, Katelynn sat quietly, doing her best to cope with the flood of feelings at Jake’s revelation. A strange sense of unease uncoiled like a snake in her belly, all cold and hungry, telling her to leave things well enough alone, not to disturb whatever it was that had lain at rest in the dark depths of that tunnel for so long. She was suddenly certain that it would do them no good to intrude.

At last she spoke up. “Do you really think it’s a good idea to go down there, Jake?” she asked tentatively, not trusting her own feelings sufficiently to protest any harder.

“We checked it out pretty thoroughly this afternoon. That tunnel is hewed from solid rock. There’s no danger of its collapsing on us,” he replied, misunderstanding her reason for caution.

Katelynn couldn’t find a way to voice her concern without looking silly and superstitious, so she let the matter drop. Mentally, she sought some rational explanation for the fear that was rapidly spreading through her, but found that none existed. Something was going to happen when they went down there, something awful. She knew it, could feel it in her bones.

While Katelynn struggled to identify her feelings, Jake and Sam quickly agreed to meet the next morning just before seven. After that, the gathering broke up quickly.

The ride home with Sam passed in silence. When they pulled into her drive, and he walked her to her door, she tried once more. “You guys really ought to just leave things alone and let Blake hire some professionals to investigate that tunnel. What if it’s unsafe, and the two of you get trapped down there?”

Sam sighed. “We’re not going to get trapped, Katelynn. You heard Jake. That tunnel has been standing for a long time. One more day isn’t going to make a difference; it’s not going to suddenly come tumbling down around our ears. You’re just jealous that you can’t go with us because you have class in the morning.” He chuckled, not recognizing the depths of her fear. “Go on, get inside,” he said. “We’ll tell you all about it at lunch tomorrow. We’ll be fine. You’ll see.” With a wave he turned away down the steps.

Katelynn was still standing there, watching, as the tail-lights of his car disappeared around the curve at the end of her street.

In the darkness, she shivered.

5

HALLORAN

As Jake was telling his friends about that afternoon’s discovery, across town another type of celebration was going on.

Kyle Halloran was getting drunk. He sat at the bar in Mikey’s Place, his oversize frame dwarfing the padded stool, his thick, meaty hands wrapped around a frosted mug of beer, his ninth of the night.

His craggy, square-jawed face reflected the emotions roiling there just beneath the surface. He sat there, dressed in the same sweat-stained T-shirt and jeans he’d been wearing all day while working under the hot sun, and let the anger swell inside him like gas in an overripe corpse.

Fuck Jake!he thought savagely.Bust my ass all day long for the guy and does he show any gratitude? Hell, no!

He slammed the mug up to his lips, drunkenly unaware that the glass cracked against his teeth. He took a long swallow, finishing off the drink.

The first time I ask for a raise and what do I get?“Sorry, Halloran, you’re just not working hard enough for me to give you one yet,” he mimicked in a high, squeaky voice.

Halloran slapped several bills down on the counter and stumbled out into the night air. The cool crispness cut through the beer-induced haze, sharpening his anger. Insisting on a raise earlier in the day had gotten him fired. Now, as Halloran stumbled off down the street, barely conscious of where he was going, his thoughts turned to how he could pay Jake back for his prejudice against him.

After considering several plans, each of which involved physical damage to Jake himself, Kyle stopped for a moment under a streetlamp, trying to discern just where he was. The sign before him readLAMPLIGHTER LANE , and it took him several moments to realize that he had wandered in the opposite direction from his apartment.

“Shit!” he swore into the darkness, turning to go back.

As he turned, the peak of a house caught his eye as it rose over the treetops to his left.

It was the Blake estate once known as Stonemoor, the very place he’d been working for the last several weeks. Seeing it brought his thoughts of revenge back into focus, and a plan began to form. He’d heard something that afternoon that he could use against Caruso.

Something about the cellar…

Then he had it.A secret passage! Cantelli’s crew had found a secret passage down in the cellar. Joey Henderson had told him about it at lunch that afternoon. He’d barely heard him at the time, and he wished he had listened more closely. Hadn’t he said something about it leading to some kind of secret room, a storage room, or a…

A treasure vault.

The idea took sudden hold.Why else would somebody build a room underground that nobody could get to? That had to be it!

It took only a moment for him to make up his mind about what to do with the information.When opportunity knocks, only a fool doesn’t answer, he thought,and I am no fool. Right here in front of me is a way to screw Caruso over and get rich at the same time.

He glanced around, satisfying himself that no one was watching, then set off through the woods in the direction of the estate.

Ten minutes later he was crouched at the corner of the supply shed by the side of the house. A quick survey of the area assured him that the idiot, Caruso, hadn’t hired a night watchman.Just shows how stupid he really is, Kyle thought wryly. He stepped out of hiding and over to the shed. Reaching out, he tried the door.

Locked.

No matter. He knew how to deal with the situation. Kyle wandered around to the back of the mansion to where the construction crews had been discarding the wood and metal pieces they’d been replacing inside the house, along with a few inexpensive tools. From the pile he selected a crowbar.

Halloran returned to the shed and forced the point of the iron bar into the opening between the doorjamb and the hasp of the lock. One strong heave, and the door swung open with a muffled crack. Kyle stepped inside. It took only a few moments to gather the supplies he needed: a couple of heavy-duty flashlights, a pickax, and a shovel.

The mansion’s front door gave more easily than the trailer’s had. Once in, he flipped on one of the flashlights to light the way. The mansion was set back a good way from the road and who in his right mind would come out there at that time of the night? It was creepy enough in the daylight, never mind after dark. Goose bumps rose on his arms the moment he stepped inside.

He found the steps to the cellar and descended into the darkened basement. He crossed the floor, damp muck sucking at his heels, darkness surrounding him, pressing in on him from all sides.

If he’d been sober, he might have noticed the heavy silence that enveloped the house in its smothering embrace. He might have noticed the sudden rush of electrical tension that filled the spaces between that silence like a living entity, making the hair on the back of his neck stand at attention.

But he remained blissfully unaware.

The dark maw of the staircase leading underground suddenly loomed in the floor before him, and he jerked to a stop, almost stumbling down the steps. The gloom from the tunnel mouth seemed thicker than the darkness around him, and he shined his light down the steps, cutting through it with the precision of a scalpel. Dust motes swirled in the beam, and he could see where the passing of others earlier in the day had disturbed the thick layer of dust on the floor.

A vague sense of unease slowly seeped its way through his pores. He had the sudden feeling that someone was watching, and he turned quickly, shining the light back across the room in the direction he’d come.

The room was empty.

For a moment he toyed with the idea of giving up his crazy scheme and going home. But visions of gold danced before his eyes, and the notion was soon forgotten. He’d come this far.There’s no stopping now, he thought.

Taking a deep breath, he strode down the steps into the darkness below.

In Room 310, the old man lay trapped in that twilight realm that hovers between sleeping and wakefulness. He lay on his side, curled into a fetal position, a thin trail of spittle falling from his slightly parted lips to the surface of his pillow. Every few moments he was wracked by spasms that made him quiver as if volts of electricity were being passed through his body. His eyes flicked back and forth beneath the protective skin of their lids.

In his dreams, he stood in a narrow stone tunnel, a little behind and to the left of a tall, hulking man who, in turn, stood before a brick wall that sealed off the passage in which they stood. The man’s emotions rolled off him in waves; he was full of rage and spite. He stood there, smashing at the wall with a pickax, determined to break through to the other side. The old man watched as the youth lifted the pick yet again, those powerful arms swinging it toward the wall with tremendous force. As the stroke fell, time seemed to slow, and he watched in horrid fascination as the pickax swung silently downward. He could see that much of the barrier had already been destroyed, and he knew that if the man succeeded in breaking through, the ancient adversary would be free to walk the face of the earth.

He could not allow that to happen.

Unwilling to admit defeat, yet knowing that he was probably too late, he screamed out in desperation, hoping against hope to delay that final blow.

“Stop!!!”

Kyle’s swing faltered, the handle slipped in his hands, and he came close to smashing his kneecap into oblivion as the heavy head of the pickax bounced off the wall before him and came rearing back in his direction.

“Fuck! You could have crippled me!” he said savagely as he turned to face the speaker, his anger overcoming his fear at being discovered.

What he saw as he turned brought his cursing to an abrupt halt, however.

The corridor behind him was empty.

“Hello?” he called in a suddenly shaky voice.

His cry echoed back at him along the length of the tunnel, ghostly whispers of sound.Hello, hello, hello ….

“Who’s there?”

Who’s there, there, there….

“Shit!”

Shit, shit, shit….

Kyle turned away. “Must have been my imagination,” he mumbled to himself, dismissing the incident from his mind with the overconfidence of a drunk. He could see that it would only take another swing for him to break through the barrier and as he hefted the pickax once more, visions of gold returned to dance in his mind.

He brought the pick up and back down again in a solid swing.

The stroke was directly on target.

With a loud crash, the stones before him gave way, revealing a hole a foot or two in diameter.

“Yes!” he cried exuberantly, this time not even hearing the echoes as they bounded away in the darkness behind him.A couple more minutes, and I’ll be rich! He dropped the pick and retrieved his flashlight from where it had been propped up on a nearby stone to provide him light.

He shined the light into the hole.

A horrible, hideous face lunged out of the darkness at him.

“Christ!” he screamed, his sudden fear making his voice high and shrill.

He dropped the light, not hearing the small sound of breaking glass as it struck the floor, and grabbed the pickax, bringing it up over his shoulder ready to strike at the thing should it emerge from its hole.

Kyle was too stubborn to run away. He waited there in the darkness for a moment, his ears straining to hear the slightest sound from the thing ahead of him. He trembled with fear yet held his ground, prepared to smash the thing’s ugly face as soon as it stuck its head out of the hole.

Nothing happened.

After a few minutes, he cautiously bent down and felt around at his feet for one of the other lights he’d carried in with him. His heart racing in his chest, he slowly moved closer to the hole and shined the light back inside.

The face was there again, and he almost jumped away a second time when he noticed something he’d missed before. The eyes of the thing were coated with a thick layer of dirt and dust.

“What the hell?” he whispered.

He stepped closer, putting his head inside the hole, closer to the thing itself. He could see more clearly, and, after another minute, he started laughing softly. His laughter grew from a light chuckle to a total, uncontrolled braying, until he was laughing so hard that tears ran down his face.

The thing was a statue.A fucking statue! he thought to himself.I was scared of a statue! His laughter echoed inside the enclosed space. He failed to hear the raw edges of hysteria in its tone.

Feeling much better than he had a moment before, Kyle pulled his head back out of the hole he’d created and once more hefted the pickax. Five more minutes of work made the hole large enough for him to step through.

Shining the light around the room, Halloran could see that the chamber he stood in was little bigger than ten by ten, with the same distance between the ceiling and the floor. The statue seemed to be the only object in the room.

He moved around it, his steps stirring up small clouds of dust. The statue was made of some kind of dark, unfamiliar stone. It didn’t seem to be worth anything, as far as he could tell, no rubies for eyes or anything like that. After another close look he dismissed it from his thoughts and turned away.

He was there for treasure, not some weird stone statue.

Problem was, as far as he could tell, the rest of the room was empty.

There also didn’t appear to be any other way out except the one he had created.

Now what?

He stood still and thought for a few moments, eventually deciding that there must be another secret room hidden inside this one. No one would take the time and energy to carve a room out of solid rock to stick some ugly statue in it, would they?

Turning his back on the statue, he began running his hands over the surface of the walls, searching for hidden levers or switches that might activate an opening. He occasionally struck the wall roughly with the haft of the pickax, listening for echoes that might indicate the presence of an open space beyond. That was how they always did it in the movies. He figured that it might work for him as well.

After fifteen minutes of searching, he hadn’t found anything, despite circling the entire room twice.

Frustrated, Kyle turned to face the statue. Suddenly the room seemed to dip and sway like an unstable boat in rough seas. He put out a hand to steady himself, only to discover that the wall seemed to be receding. That upset his equilibrium further. His feet tangled, and, before he knew it, he struck the floor heavily, knocking the breath from his lungs.

For a moment he stayed where he was, regaining his breath. After a minute or two he realized that a sharp pain was radiating from the palm of his right hand. Pulling himself into a sitting position against the base of the statue, he reached out with his other hand and dragged the flashlight back from where it had fallen when he dropped it. By its light he could see a deep cut crisscrossing his right palm.

Must have fallen on the pick,he thought to himself, and a quick glance in that direction with the flashlight showed a faint red smear along its blade.

He shifted his position, intending to climb to his feet. He only managed to pull himself up on his knees before another wave of dizziness washed over him.

His head spun, the room reeled around him, and the flashlight fell from his hand with a distant crash, shattering against the base of the stone.

The darkness that suddenly enveloped the room matched his own.

He was unconscious by the time his body hit the floor.

* * *

With the echoes of his shout reverberating in his mind, the old man awoke. His heart was trip-hammering in his chest like a snare drum, sending a sharp pain through his left side. For a few anxious moments he was certain the frail vessel would burst asunder.

No,he thought.Not now, not yet, he silently pleaded. It seemed someone heard him, for the pain slowly receded, and his heartbeat settled into a more stable rhythm. He breathed a bit easier and raised a weak hand to wipe the thick sheen of sweat from his brow.

The chill in his gut and the sudden joyous laughter that echoed in his mind told him all he needed to know about the effects of his warning.

The beast was free.

6

BENEATH THE SURFACE

Early the next morning Jake drove his Jeep into Sam’s driveway and sounded two quick taps of the horn. Then he dug into the bag he’d placed on the floor behind the passenger seat, pulling out a cup of coffee and a donut.

Sam came down the steps dressed in jeans and a Benton University sweatshirt, a pair of thick hiking boots on his feet. Around his neck were slung two cameras and an assortment of lenses. A fanny pack strapped around his waist bulged with additional gear.

“What is all that?” Jake asked, as Sam climbed inside the vehicle.

“Necessities, Jake. You don’t expect me to go on possibly one of the most interesting finds this town has seen in two hundred years and not bring along some means of recording the event, do you? I just wish my damn video camera wasn’t in the shop, or I’d have brought that along, too.”

Jake chuckled as he handed the coffee and donut to Sam and dug another donut out of the bag for himself. He couldn’t blame Sam for his enthusiasm; he, too, was anxious to see just what it was that had been worth burying beneath a living river. In the short time it took to cross town and arrive at the mansion, Jake felt his excitement grow.

At the end of Stonemoor’s drive, Jake turned left into the construction area proper and parked in front of his trailer, where something caught his eye.

The door to the toolshed was wide-open, hanging in its frame by only one hinge.

Jake grunted in surprise, and walked over, with Sam at his heels. Jake had experienced robberies at other sites, had even bought a pistol he kept in his desk drawer in the trailer so that he’d feel some protection while working alone at night, but he had never expected to have one at Stonemoor. For a moment he was more surprised than angry. There wasn’t anything of great value in the toolshed.What would somebody want with some old shovels and a pickax or two? he found himself wondering.

“Why would anybody want to…” Jake began, then stopped, his eyes widening in sudden realization. “The tunnel!” he exclaimed.

Without a word, Sam turned to go, anxious that someone else had beaten him to what he considered the story of his lifetime, but Jake grabbed his arm.

“Hang on. You’ve got to help me with this stuff.” He let go and turned to the shed, pushing the door aside and disappearing within. He returned a moment later with a couple of shovels, a crowbar, and a pickax cradled in his arms. He gave a shovel to Sam and kept the other for himself. Then he moved over to the trailer and, unlocking the door, went inside. He had a large ring of keys and two battery-powered lanterns in his hands when he emerged. His pistol was stuck in the waistband of his jeans.

“We’re going to need them to see down there,” he said, indicating the lamps. “We haven’t had a chance to string any lights yet.”

They crossed the yard, headed for the front door. As they walked, Jake felt his concern growing. Very few people knew of what they’d uncovered the previous day. Unless some of the crew had shot their mouths off to friends, it had to be one of his men who had caused the damage they’d seen. After all, they’d be the ones most likely to know just where the tools were kept and what they might need down in the cellar.

His suspicions that someone had been after whatever was hidden in the tunnel were confirmed when he and Sam mounted the steps, only to discover the front door standing half-open like an invitation.

That pissed him off. Blake was going to have a fit when he told him about the break-in, and Jake fervently hoped nothing had been stolen from inside. That would make matters even worse.God help me when I find out who did this, he thought grimly.

Behind him, Sam was taking pictures. The click of the camera sent Jake over the edge.

“Will you knock that off, for Christ’s sake?” he snapped angrily.

Sam wisely lowered the camera without a word.

The same gouge marks were in the frame of this door, and on closer inspection Jake recognized them as having come from the notched end of a crowbar. Just to be sure, he hefted the one he had in his hand and laid it against one of the marks. It was a near perfect match.

Looking at the state of the aged oak that made up the doorframe, Jake ruefully shook his head.Add another itemto the list of things that need to be replaced, he thought to himself.

He reached out to the door, intending on going inside, when Sam’s voice stopped him.

“Ah, Jake?”

Jake turned, a questioning look on his face.

“Don’t you think we’d better call the police?” Sam asked, nodding in the direction of the trailer and the phone he knew to be inside.

Jake thought about it for a minute, then shook his head. “Not just yet. I want to have a look around first, try to get an idea of what kind of damage has been done. See if there’s anything missing.”And I want to have a look at that tunnel, he added silently.

The open door beckoned to him.

He opened it the rest of the way with a gentle nudge of his foot, Sam’s request reminding him that he didn’t want to disturb any evidence unnecessarily, and stepped inside, Sam close at his heels.

The morning sun had yet to rise high enough to crest the trees surrounding the property, making the interior of the house dim and gloomy. Jake was forced to turn on one of the lanterns to see clearly.

The entryway looked undisturbed.

“Wait here a sec,” he said to Sam, and stuck his nose into the rooms on either side of the foyer. Everything looked to be in its place.

Jake didn’t bother going up the stairs directly ahead of him. They led to the second floor, and there was nothing of value up there anyway. Besides, for some strange reason he was certain the intruder hadn’t gone up.

He’d gone down instead.

To the basement.

To the tunnel.

“Come on,” Jake said, and crossed the foyer into the dining room and out through the kitchen to the door that opened onto the cellar steps.

Holding the light high before him, he descended.

Once down below he discovered that his suspicions were correct. The tarp covering the stairs leading deeper into the earth had been pulled aside. A crowbar lay discarded next to it.

Jake moved over to the steps with Sam right behind him. A hand gesture told Sam to extinguish his light, which he did, and the two of them stood there in the darkness.

No lights shone up the stairs from below.

No sound reached their ears.

Jake drew his gun and leaned close to his friend. “Looks like we’re alone, but let’s not take any chances. Keep your voice down and follow me. If we come upon an intruder, I’ll hold him at bay while you go back to the trailer and call for help.”

Sam gripped the shovel in his hands a bit tighter and nodded his agreement.

Turning on their lights and moving carefully so as to make as little noise as possible, the two started down the steps in pursuit of the intruder.

They moved down the length of the tunnel and turned the corner to find a large hole cut in the center of the wall that had previously blocked the way. Jake stopped before the hole, shining his light inside, gazing through it at the scene on the other side.

Sam stepped up to his side and added his light to his friend’s.

After a moment, he lowered the flashlight and raised his camera.

Several shots later he turned to Jake, and asked, “Now can we call the police?”

Jake nodded without saying a word.

On the other side of the wall, the corpse of Kyle Halloran gazed back at them with wide, staring eyes.

7

WILSON

Damon Wilson was on duty in Harrington Falls when the call came in. As sheriff of Algonquin County, he was responsible for the safety of the inhabitants of not only Glendale, but also Harrington Falls and the other similar mountain communities within the county limits. He had two men out sick, so he was covering their shifts himself, patrolling in his Bronco.

“I’ll take it, base. I’m in the vicinity.”

“That’s a roger, Sheriff. See Jake Caruso at the site.”

“Ten-four.”

Damon replaced the microphone and headed for the Stonemoor estate.

Back when he was on the force in Chicago, such calls had been a fairly commonplace occurrence. They were called into abandoned buildings and derelict lots all the time, especially during the summer months when the stench of decomposing corpses would disturb the denizens of even the roughest neighborhoods. The winters weren’t so bad; a body could lie in the dark for weeks without being discovered. He’d seen his fair share; that was certain.

But here in Harrington Falls?He couldn’t remember the last time there had been a violent crime. Glendale was a bit different; a little more modern, more bad apples. Harrington Falls seemed to have missed all of that, nestled as it was in the mountains. The people were quiet folk. They kept to themselves and generally obeyed the law. Aside from the occasional loud drunk or teenage shoplifter, the patrol in Harrington Falls was considered incident-free.

Making the call even more interesting.

As Damon pulled up in front of the house, he saw two men sitting on the top step of the porch, obviously waiting for him.

Jake watched as a large, heavyset man got out of the Bronco. Roughly six-foot two, he had to weigh a good 250. His hair was salt and pepper, right down to his beard and mustache. Both were carefully groomed and short in length. The man was dressed in the brown uniform of the sheriff’s department, with a pistol clearly visible on his belt.

Jake and Sam rose to greet him.

“One of you Jake Caruso?” Damon asked.

Jake said, “I am,” and extended his hand in greeting.

“Damon Wilson, sheriff’s department.” The sheriff shook Sam’s hand also. Turning back to Jake, he asked, “I understand you’ve found a body?”

Jake nodded. “Down in the cellar.”

“Mind telling me what you were doing out here in the first place?”

Jake explained to the sheriff how he came to be there that morning, going back to the events of the day before. The sheriff listened closely, made notes every few minutes, but otherwise left Jake to tell the story without interruption. When Jake was finished, the sheriff turned to Sam and asked him if he could remember any other details.

The sheriff then suggested that Sam wait outside to direct the coroner to the scene, before asking Jake to lead him to the body.

The two climbed the steps to the house, passed through the foyer and the kitchen, and reached the stairway to the basement. The smell of mildew and decay from below reached Damon. For just a moment, he had a vivid picture of bodies lying for days in forgotten Chicago tenements, the memory of another time, another place. He quickly slammed the lid closed on that particular memory before it could escape the Pandora’s box of his mind. Chicago was a long time ago, and Damon definitely wanted to keep it that way.

Jake headed down the steps, and Damon followed.

“Sorry about the stench. When we began renovations, this entire level was flooded. My men pumped out the fetid water the other night, but the smell will probably linger for a while.”

“That’s how you found this tunnel?” Damon asked.

“Yeah. There was a big stone slab in the middle of a small trench dug into the floor. The tunnel was underneath it.”

Jake had left the lanterns behind when he and Sam went to the trailer to call the police. By their illumination Damon could see the trench where the men had been working. When they moved closer, he could see the opening to the passage itself.

Jake stopped and picked up his lantern from where he had left it beside the opening. He nodded at the heavy flashlight the sheriff was carrying. “You’d better turn that on.”

The sheriff was surprised at the tunnel. It appeared to be man-made, carved from solid rock sometime long ago. The effort that went into such an undertaking had to have been incredible.

Why would someone go to all this trouble?he wondered.

He didn’t have much time to think about it, however, since they were rapidly approaching their destination. Ahead, Damon could see the remains of a brick wall that had once blocked the tunnel. Jake stopped a few feet away, allowing Damon to pass him.

Damon stood just outside the chamber and gazed in at the body. He could see that it was that of a white male, in his mid-to-late twenties, lying faceup and partially on his right side. The man’s face was twisted into an expression of horror. One arm was trapped beneath the body, the other hung limply across the base of the statue. In the dim light, Damon could not make out any signs of injury.

“This the way you found him?”

Jake nodded. “I went inside the room and checked his pulse, but I didn’t touch or move anything.”

Damon shined the light around the rest of the room. The only objects were a heavy-duty flashlight, lying against the opposite wall, and a pickax, a few feet away from the feet of the corpse. The room was otherwise empty.

Damon next turned his light on the statue. A good seven feet in height, it was carved entirely from some kind of shining black stone that gleamed like ebony oil in the beam of his light. It appeared to represent a demon, or maybe a gargoyle. Two long, curling horns jutted from its forehead. Its strikingly reptilian mouth was open wide, revealing a double row of razor-sharp teeth. The creature’s torso was humanoid in form, but covered with thousands of tiny scales like the flesh of a miniature dragon. Wicked-looking talons jutted from its four-fingered hands and feet. Batlike wings swept outward from the center of its back. The craftsmanship was superb, giving the creature a sense of life. To Damon it seemed as if at any moment it might leap off the small pedestal on which it stood.

“It’s certainly ugly,” Damon said. Jake didn’t answer. The statue might have been easy enough to handle if that was all it was, ugly. But there was something more, something near indefinable about it that instantly put Damon on guard. It was more a gut feeling than anything else, a sense of wrongness about the thing that disturbed him on some deep, primitive level.

Damon felt the short hairs on the back of his neck start to rise and quickly turned his attention to the body on the floor. It took him a moment, but he finally recognized it as that of Kyle Halloran. Kyle had been one of the bad ones, constantly getting into fights at the bars down in Glendale. More than once Damon had had to toss him in a cell for the night on charges of drunk and disorderly. Kyle had been the type to stay out of trouble for a month, maybe two, then end up back in a cell on similar charges.

Aside from the expression on his face, there were no obvious signs of violence. Damon could not detect any evidence of a disturbance in the dirt around him, either. Drugs were the first thing that came to mind. That would explain the lack of injury. The theory might also explain the man’s expression.Who knew what one might encounter in their own drug-induced hallucinations?

“Recognize him?” the sheriff asked.

Jake nodded. “Kyle Halloran. Hired him last week as a temp. Bit of a loudmouth. My foreman said he was slacking on the job, so I let him go yesterday.”

“Any idea what he might have been doing down here?”

“I couldn’t even tell you how he found out about it. He wasn’t on the detail that was working down here.”

The sheriff nodded. It seemed pretty obvious to him. Halloran had heard about it from another worker, figured there might be something valuable hidden in the tunnel, and decided to check it out for himself. He’d probably been pumped to the gills with whatever he’d been on that week and taken on more than he could handle.

Damon took out his notebook and jotted down his impressions and general facts about the scene. He’d learned long ago to make a record of everything at a crime scene; you never knew what was going to be important later. When he was finished, he stepped inside the room for the first time.

Jake watched the sheriff make a careful inspection of the body. Damon squatted next to the corpse and felt for a pulse on the man’s neck. He sat back on his haunches and visually inspected the corpse, taking care not to touch anything else. After a few moments he jotted down some notes and even sketched a quick diagram of the situation. Jake recognized the hallmarks of a methodical and patient man. Once the sheriff had finished with the corpse, he turned his attention to the statue above it, going over it with the same care and diligence he’d shown with the body.

Jake didn’t want to be in the room with either the statue or the corpse. His earlier excitement had quickly died when he and Sam had discovered Kyle’s body. Now all he wanted to do was retreat back up the stairs into the bright sunshine and forget about what he’d found.

He stepped back into the passage, a glimpse of movement catching his eyes as he did so.

He turned in the doorway, staring at the statue, watching its eyes, watching its hands.

Must have been the sheriff.

Statues don’t move.

The sheriff called out to him as he turned away.

“Where does this go?” Damon asked, pointing behind him to something that Jake could not see because of the intervening statue.

“Where does what go?” Jake asked. He stepped to his left and gaped in surprise at the doorway visible on the other side of the chamber.

“Where the hell did that come from?” Jake asked.

Damon watched Jake examine the door and knew he wasn’t faking it. He really hadn’t known it was there. The iron door had been coated with a thick layer of dust and dirt, causing it to blend with the wall in the dim light. In the horror of finding the statue looming over Kyle’s body, it had been overlooked.

The sheriff intended to let the forensics team open the door once they had thoroughly checked the chamber. He hadn’t counted on Jake’s curiosity. Before the sheriff could stop him, Jake placed his hands against the door and pushed with all his strength.

The door swung outward with a groan.

Sunlight flooded the chamber.

Without a word Damon stepped over to stand next to Jake.

The two men stared out the doorway onto the carefully trimmed green of the Forest Green Cemetery.

“Holy shit,” Jake said under his breath.

The sheriff agreed.Holy shit is right. We must have traveled a couple of hundred yards underground, clear off the Blake property and onto the adjoining one. He hadn’t realized they’d gone that far.

He stepped out into the sunshine with Jake at his heels. As one, they turned to face the doorway.

The door proved to be the entrance to a white marble mausoleum that was built into the side of a small hill. Across the lintel of the doorframe was carved a name.

SEBASTIAN BLAKE.

8

RESURRECTION

Inside the tomb.

Movement.

It began as nothing more than a subtle shifting in the darkness, a change in the rank air that filled the buried structure, a stirring sense of motion that was more felt than seen, as if the air pressure had suddenly lowered.

Gradually, as the moments passed, the motion became more substantial until at last it could be seen with the naked eye, had anyone been watching.

A patch of darkness, darker than even the heavy gloom filling the tomb’s every nook and cranny, detached itself from the shadows in one corner and drifted like a curtain of mist into the center of the chamber. It churned about in rich, lazy spirals, a bubbling, seething witch’s brew that whirled and spun about itself.

The mist became a haze; the haze became a fog, and still it writhed and rolled. With each revolution it slowly gathered substance from the darkness around it. When the cloud was several feet in diameter, it slowly wrapped the statue in its inky embrace.

The murk began to adhere to the finely wrought stone, slowly at first, then faster, as the intelligence guiding it gradually awakened from a long sleep, its senses progressively becoming more in tune with physical reality.

The human blood shed earlier acted as a catalyst, providing the ingredients required for him again to assume a corporeal form. The dark union of forces that had sustained him for so long did the rest.

A light sparked about the statue, a tiny flash of crimson the size and shape of a cigarette ember, located somewhere near the center of the thing’s chest. With each pulsation it grew slowly brighter, bit by bit, until it reached the intensity of a carefully contained fire. There was no heat. The strange light seemed to give off an unnatural chill that wafted forth and turned the air inside the tomb several degrees colder than it had been moments before. The bloodred light flickered across the face of the statue, causing its teeth to gleam eerily in the glow.

The cloud pulsed and swelled as it coalesced about the figure, until it was a semisolid mass of churning black, mated to the stone, covering every exposed inch of its surface.

The light flared suddenly brighter, so bright that it would have blinded anyone in the room in its gory red glow.

But no one was there, and so the change went on.

Unheeded.

Unhindered.

Unnoticed by all but the one who’d triggered it and the other who’d sought so desperately to prevent it.

A smell suddenly filled the air, a stench like the cloying reek of sulfur. With it the light flared in a flash that lasted for several long moments.

When the light died down and the darkness returned, the beast that had been hidden for centuries stood in the center of the room where the statue had been just moments before.

In the darkness, yellow eyes gleamed brightly.

The beast remained where it was for a moment or two, rejoicing in its newfound freedom. The rush of the stolen blood in its veins brought a rhythmic pounding to its ears, and after the ages of silence even that slight, internal sound was like thunder.

It reveled in it. It was alive.

The creature once known as Moloch walked toward the door, eager to escape the confines of the dank, stone structure where he’d been imprisoned. He moved with steady deliberation; the first steps were slow and awkward, the joints in his knees and hips seemed rusted tight with disuse. After a few more steps the tissues began to remember and established the proper rhythm.

Where his movements had at first been disjointed, jerky, they gradually became fluid, composed and filled with a savage, feline grace. He walked the circumference of the room. Once, twice, three times, each step renewing his familiarity with physical motion and the laws that governed it.

As he walked he worked his arms, swinging them back and forth at the elbows and rotating them in their shoulder sockets, flexing the muscles of his biceps. He clenched and unclenched his fists.

Moloch opened and closed his jaw several times, snapping it shut to hear the sharp click of his teeth with force enough to crush bone to a pulp.

He delighted in the tension and release of the muscles in his back and legs. The sound of his claws scraping the rough stone underfoot sent a shiver of pleasure through his frame.

Moloch strode across the chamber. With a shove from one muscle-laden arm, he swung wide the door. It crashed against the outer wall with a loud metallic clang. He was barely aware of the sound, so entranced was he with the sight through the open door.

There, just steps away, lay freedom.

Sounds were assaulting him from all sides; the whisper of the wind, the trip-hammer of tiny hearts in the shrubbery.

He laughed, the sound welling up from the depths of his throat in manic glee and echoing into the night.

It was a sound that was less than human.

Lights gleamed off in the distance. Spying them, the beast’s thoughts turned to the terrible, gnawing hunger that had awakened deep inside. Too long he had been locked inside that stone, imprisoned and left to die alone in the darkness. Too long he had existed in that twilight between this world and the next, his life extended by the dark forces that had imprisoned him there.

Now he was free.

Free to act.

Free to feed.

He extended his arms. The leathery wings that lay smoothly against the surface of his back extended with them, rustling in the breeze like the sound of a quickly snapped sheet. Bunching the muscles in his scaled legs, Moloch gave a powerful downward shove and cast his body upward into the dark night.

9

A DEATH EXPLAINED?

Edward Strickland, medical examiner for Algonquin County, stepped into the chill confines of the morgue and switched on the lights. Though it was late in the evening, Strickland was preparing to perform one last task for the night, a task he had saved until the end, so that other duties would not prevent him from giving it his complete attention.

Strickland was an agreeable man in his early sixties, and had been ME for sixteen years. Despite his constant joking that the only reason he’d been able to retain his post was due to the fact that nobody else wanted it, he was a competent professional who got the job done and got it done right the first time. He was nearing retirement, but was in no way ready for it.

His work was a constant puzzle to him, and he pursued it with an almost fanatic devotion. To find him working far into the night, as he planned on this occasion, was not an unusual occurrence. The silence in the morgue after hours was deep and peaceful, soothing, vastly different from the hectic pace that enveloped the facility during regular hours.

Brilliant fluorescent lights illuminated the room in which he was working, washing across the institutional green walls and slick linoleum floor. A body lay on the mortician’s table before him, its flesh a sickly shade of gray, the color of death. A wide white tag was tied to the big toe on the corpse’s left foot, giving the deceased’s name, age, and presumed cause of death. Strickland gave the tag a quick glance.

“Halloran, Kyle, Caucasian male, age twenty-six, probable overdose,” he read to himself, humming aloud to the strains of Mozart that wafted through the room from the speakers set in the ceiling above, just loud enough to be heard.

His rubber-soled shoes made barely a sound as he circled the body before him, carefully looking it over for any obvious injuries, dictating his findings aloud so the microphone above the table could pick them up for transcription.

When he thought he’d seen all there was to see, he moved to the tray of instruments set up alongside and picked up a scalpel. The cool metal of the blade glinted sharply in the light.

“Now, my dead, young friend, “ he said to the corpse as he reached out and made the first incision in the slightly rubbery flesh, “let’s see what secrets you’re hiding.”

Three hours later he was finished. When he’d first read the tag, Strickland had expected the postmortem to be a rather straightforward piece of work. But now he realized that this was anything but a straightforward case. He discovered a number of things that just didn’t make any sense, and while they bothered him, they also sparked his professional curiosity; something that didn’t happen all that often anymore. In over thirty years of forensic medicine, he thought he’d seen it all. The body on the table before him proved him wrong. Determined to get to the bottom of things, he dialed Sheriff Wilson’s office extension.

“Hello?”

“Damon, it’s Ed. Figured I’d find you there. Don’t you ever go home?”

Wilson laughed. “Sure, right around the same time you do.” The two men had known each other for years, from before Damon had gone off to Chicago. They’d gone to the same high school together, had even dated some of the same women. Their friendship had picked up again once Damon had returned home.

“What’s up?” Damon asked.

“I just finished that autopsy on the young fellow you pulled out of that crypt over on the Blake family plot.”

“Halloran. Kyle Halloran.”

Ed grunted. “Yeah, that’s the one. Thought you should know that it wasn’t your everyday, run-of-the-mill experience. Some of the results I got are pretty strange.”

“Strange funny or strange weird?”

“Strange weird.”

“Like what?” Damon asked. “Hell, it’ an open-and-shut case. Witnesses said the guy had been drinking and snorting enough cocaine earlier in the night to flatten an elephant. Too much physical exertion after all that, and you end up in cardiac arrest.”

“Well, for one thing, it wasn’t an overdose that killed him.”

Damon laughed. “Yeah, right. Try telling that to his heart and respiratory system. They’re still trying to figure out what hit them.”

“That’s just it, Damon. The toxicology tests showed high traces of benzoylecganine, so the guy had been doing cocaine earlier that night, enough to send most people straight to the moon. Combine that with a blood alcohol level of 1.8, and you can be damn sure he was as high as a kite when he went. Probably didn’t feel a thing. But it wasn’t the drugs or the booze that killed him.” Ed paused, then said, “He bled to death.”

“What?” Damon asked, shocked.

“You heard me,” Strickland replied. “He bled to death.”

“But that’s not possible, Ed. There were no wounds on the body, and we certainly didn’t find anything to indicate that at the scene. For a guy that size to lose enough blood to kill him, we should have found a lake of the stuff. We didn’t; the place was as dry as a bone.”

“Didn’t you tell me the floor of that tomb was just dirt? Could it have simply seeped into the ground and whoever was at the scene just missed it?”

“C’mon, Ed. My men are better than that. Besides, I’m the one who answered the call. There wasn’t any blood.Nada , nothing, zippo. Catch my drift?”

Ed sighed. “Yeah, I hear you. It’s been bothering me, too. But it gets worse. I can’t figure out how it happened. There weren’t any wounds on the body, nothing but a fairly shallow cut on the palm of one hand. It probably hurt like hell, and bled a bit, but certainly not enough to kill someone.”

“Shit, Ed, this is not good.” Damon shook his head in bewilderment. It sounded like the case was going to be one bitch of a headache, and he just didn’t need that just then.

Then Ed said something else, and it was so weird that Damon thought he hadn’t heard him correctly.

“Run that one by me again?”

“I said, this guy didn’t just lose enough blood to kill him, he lost all of it.”

Damon felt goose bumps suddenly rise on his arms. “What do you meanall of it?”

“Just what I said. All of it. You know how it works. Once the heart stops, the blood will normally pool in the lowest portion of the corpse, giving the flesh there a dark purplish coloration. Except, in this case, that didn’t happen. I couldn’t find any evidence of postmortem lividity anywhere on the body. If you hadn’t told me the position he had been found in, I wouldn’t have been able to figure it out. And when I cut him open, I didn’t even have to drain him. I could have done the whole procedure on my kitchen table and eaten off of it afterward. He was that clean.”

While listening, Damon had involuntarily stiffened in his seat. Something wasn’t right; that much was obvious. On some deeper, more primal level, Damon was suddenly certain that things were going to get a lot worse.

“Hey, Damon, you there?”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m here. Got anything else, Ed?”

“Sorry. That’s it, I’m afraid.”

“Okay, thanks for the call. I appreciate it. And listen, keep this one from the press for a while, will ya?”

“Sure thing, Damon. Talk to you soon.”

For the first time in his long career, Edward Strickland found that he didn’t want to be alone with a corpse.

Damon hung up the phone and leaned back in his chair, his gaze resting on the far wall but not really seeing it. His thoughts were elsewhere.

Bled to death?

How?

The whole thing was absurd. The pickax they found was several yards away from the corpse. There was no way he could have hurt himself.Even if he had, how do you bleed to death from a cut on the palm of the hand? It just wasn’t possible.

He thought back to the events of that morning, picturing the scene in his mind. The corpse had been sprawled in that dark, little room at the base of that ugly statue with little evidence anywhere that there had been any kind of confrontation or struggle, one small wound on the body. That was why he’d been so positive that it had been an overdose or a heart attack. All his years of police work had pointed him in that direction.

Did I miss something?

He didn’t think he had. The forensics team had shown its usual diligence going over the scene once he’d called it in, and he had even stayed behind to supervise. He was positive the job had been done thoroughly and professionally.

Nevertheless, he had a nagging feeling that he hadn’t seen everything he should have, that he had overlooked something important.

Damon was a cop who believed in hunches. More than once during the course of an investigation he’d gotten a feeling about a certain aspect of the case. Nothing more than that, just an impression, a blind, gut reaction not founded on anything he could put into a logical sequence. He learned to pay attention to them, more often than not discovering that he was right. He knew such a reaction was simply his unconscious mind tying things together in a way that his conscious mind had overlooked, and his “hunches” were just its way of telling him to perk up and pay attention.

Something about the mental image of the crime scene was bothering him—something he couldn’t put his finger on, and so, instead of going home as he’d been about to do before Ed phoned, he went to his filing cabinets and pulled out the case file. He pulled out the photographs of the crime scene. He stared at each of them slowly in turn, scrutinizing them for something he might have missed.

The pictures looked the same as they had before. The cemetery, the tomb, the corpse. Nothing more.

He picked up the few photos that were solely of the statue itself, staring at the face carved into the stone with a strange mixture of admiration and revulsion. He had to admit it really was a marvelous piece of work, if you happened to like that sort of thing.

The detail in the work was astounding. Every little detail was rendered precisely, from the scales that covered the face to the curved claws that extended from the feet. All in all, it was a stunning piece of work.

Damon just didn’t like it. Remembering how he’d felt beneath its stony gaze still made him uncomfortable. If he didn’t know better, he would have sworn the damn thing had been watching him the whole time he was down there. Looking into its eyes in the photographs, that feeling returned. The beast seemed to gaze back at him, the glint of an evil intelligence in its stony orbs.

Something was there in the pictures, something important that he was overlooking. He just wasn’t seeing it.

But what?

Tired and more than a bit frustrated, he returned the photos to the file and put them away in his drawer. He’d had enough for one day; staring at the photographs for another couple of hours wasn’t going to get him anywhere. It was time to call it a night.

As he crossed the parking lot to his car, Damon had the uneasy feeling he wasn’t alone.

He glanced around.

Beneath the dirty yellow light of the sodium-vapor lamps, nothing stirred.

The lot was empty.

He shrugged, dismissing the feeling. Too much work and an overactive imagination, that was all it was.

Yet in the back of his mind an image lingered.

A pair of stone eyes, watching…

10

A DEATH IN THE NIGHT

“Bring me another piece of that cake, would ya, honey?”

In the kitchen, Martha Cummings looked through the interior window that connected to the next room. Her husband George was seated in his favorite recliner in front of the television. Her gaze was full of affection as she took in his slightly overweight body and the little round bald spot on the top of his head. She shook her head in mock dismay at his request, but happily complied with it nonetheless.

Martha was in her late sixties and quite happy with her lot in life. Time had been good to her. A large, buxom woman, not particularly pretty by modern standards, but filled with an inordinate amount of kindness, she had married her present husband, after two unsuccessful marriages, at the age of thirty-five. She had a nice home, an affectionate husband, and enough money to keep the two of them happy for the rest of their lives. That was more than most could say, and for that she was thankful.

Of course, there were her cats, too.

Martha’s pride and joy, the cats had proven to be an acceptable substitute for her inability to have children. She lavished on them all the care and love and attention she might have given her own children. They were a constant nuisance to her husband, although he was sweetly tolerant for her sake. The felines had free run of the house and yard. She had lost track of how many of them there actually were, having stopped counting somewhere after sixteen. Originally there had been only five, each with a separate name, but before long she’d given up trying to keep them all straight and begun referring to them all now simply as Kitty. They didn’t seem to mind, and it was much easier that way.

She brought the cake to her husband, along with a tall glass of milk. “Here you are, dear,” she said, giving him a quick peck on his bald spot. That flustered him a little, since he was self-conscious about the loss of his hair, but his eyes let her know that it was all right.

Back in the kitchen she decided to start an apple pie that she would bake the next day and was deep into the process when George announced he was going up to bed.

“Are you going to stay down here all night or will you be joining me?” he asked, a suggestive leer on his face.

She blushed. Despite their advanced age, the two of them enjoyed a good grope in the dark more than once a week, as if they were a couple of hormone-crazed teenagers. It didn’t matter that nine times out of ten the machinery didn’t work. It was the desire that counted, and lately it seemed to be increasing. It made her feel wickedly sinful to know that her husband still wanted her after all these years, and that alone was worth all the trouble.

She leered back at him. “I’ll be up in just a few minutes. If you’re still awake when I get there, old-timer, maybe we can find something to keep us awake a while longer.” She waved her hands at him. “Now shoo and let me finish or I’ll just sleep on the couch for the night, and you won’t get anything.”

George gave her a quick kiss and disappeared up the stairs in a hurry, muttering to himself about domineering women as he went. Martha turned back to her baking.

Her pace was quicker than it had been a few moments before.

Half an hour later, just as she was placing the pie into the refrigerator where it would stay until she had a chance to slip it into the oven in the morning, she heard a long, thin wail coming from the front yard.

Martha stopped in midmotion, bent over in front of the open refrigerator door, pie in hand, her head cocked to one side.

The house around her was silent, the only sound the ticking of the grandfather clock in the living room.

After a few moments of intent listening, she decided the noise had only been in her mind. A product of the late hour and her restless imagination.

You’ve been watching too many of those horror films, Martha old girl,she told herself good-naturedly, and slid the pie onto the shelf. She straightened up and closed the fridge, turning back to the sink to get a sponge to wash the countertops.

That was when the scream came again, a high-pitched shriek that reflexively made her pull her head down into the crook of her shoulders in response.

She took a step toward the window above the sink overlooking the front yard, but hesitated, the action uncompleted.What’s out there? she thought, frightened, visions of ax-wielding psychopaths swimming through her mind. She suddenly wasn’t certain she wanted to discover the origin of that cry. What if it was just a trick to get her near the window?

What if I look out, only to find someone looking in?

As soon as that particular thought crossed her mind, she was struck with the uncanny feeling that someonewas out there, watching her.

Watching.

And waiting.

Martha turned and quickly made her way to the staircase, wanting to be anywhere but alone in that room. She intended to go upstairs and wake George. He’d know how to handle the situation. He’d know just what to do.

She was halfway up the stairs when another cry reached her ears, and this time there was no mistaking its animal origin.

The image of a blood-smeared feline loomed, and in the rush of motherly affection that accompanied it, her fear dissipated.

One of her babies needed her.

Boosted by her concern for her feline charges, Martha got herself under control.Go on, old girl, she said to herself.March right out there and see what’s going on. No need to stand cowering in the kitchen. After all, when was the last time the police actually had to work to earn their pay in this sleepy little town? The crime rate was so low that the town council had considered tearing down the auxiliary police station to make room for a new supermarket a few months ago, and had only decided against it when a better location was discovered.

Ax-wielding psychopaths? Not in Harrington Falls.

Reassured by her logic, Martha calmly crossed to the hall closet, glancing down at her housecoat and slippers as she went. It wouldn’t do to have the neighbors see her snooping around the front lawn like that, so she drew on a long trench coat and searched for her shoes. After a moment, she remembered she’d left them by the bed upstairs. In order to retrieve them, she’d risk waking George.

“Slippers will just have to do,” she said to the pink bunnies on her feet, and wiggled her toes inside their confines, giggling at the thought of how silly she would feel if any of her neighbors caught sight of her.

She withdrew a broom with a thick wooden handle from the rack on the closet door. Holding it aloft like a baseball bat, she moved to the entryway.

“Don’t worry, Kitty,” she said softly, “Mommy’s on her way.”

Outside, the beast dropped the cat’s corpse to the ground, then licked the blood from its claws, savoring the bittersweet taste.

Suddenly, a noise caught its attention.

It stopped its grooming and peered through the branches. From where it was seated in the large, old elm that dominated the front yard, it had a clear view of the house. It watched as the front door opened and a woman stepped into view on the porch that extended the length of the house. She was holding something long and slender over one shoulder.

The beast’s eyes widened in anticipation.

Now that the appetizer was out of the way, the main course conveniently made its appearance.

Deciding it wanted to have a little fun before indulging itself, the beast slowly lowered itself to the ground.

In the darkness, Moloch smiled.

Martha stood on the front porch, peering into the darkness before her. The night was quiet. A soft wind was blowing, rustling the leaves of the nearby trees in a whispering chorus. The moon had not yet arisen, and the darkness around her seemed thick and total.

She didn’t like it.

She reached back inside the doorway and flicked the switch to turn on the porch light, but nothing happened. She tried again, with the same result.

Bulb must have blown,she thought.What a time for it, too! Her thoughts turned to the idea of waking her husband, but she quickly stifled them.

She could handle this herself.

“Here, Kitty. Here, Kitty, Kitty,” she called softly as she took a few steps farther out onto the porch.

The old wood beneath her feet groaned weakly.

“Here, Kitty, Kitty. Come to Momma.”

Only the wind answered her.

Martha crossed the porch until she stood at the top of the steps. The front lawn spread out before her, a giant carpet cloaked in dark shadows.

The night was oddly silent, the usual symphony of tree frogs and crickets absent. The fact that she could no longer hear that earlier shrieking only served to heighten her anxiety.

She peered into the gloom ahead of her.

Lights from the neighboring homes occasionally pierced the thick foliage, causing shadows to dance on the edge of her sight. Several times she thought she saw movement, but when she looked directly at that spot, nothing was there.

As she descended the few steps to the stone walkway that led to the drive, a low, furtive rustling reached her ears. She stood still, listening.

After a moment she heard it again. It was coming from a stand of bushes off to her left.

Cautiously, she moved a few steps closer.

“Here, Kitty,” she called softly.

The bushes rustled again.

She stepped closer, to just a foot or two away, feeling the cool moisture from the dew-laden grass that had soaked through the material of her slippers onto the soles of her feet.

The rustling came again, this time accompanied by a plaintive meow.

The sound made Martha smile, and she lowered the broomstick in response as relief surged through her system. It had been one of her cats, after all.

Poor baby’s probably trapped in the hedges and can’t get out,she thought. Laying the broom on the lawn, she softly crept forward the last few feet, not wanting to scare the little darling, and reached out with both hands.

“Easy, baby,” she said. “Momma’s here to help you.”

Very gently, she parted the bushes and pushed her head into the space she’d created.

She didn’t even have time to scream.

When Moloch was finished, he hefted what was left of the corpse under one arm and turned toward the house.

His meal was not yet complete.

There was another human inside. He could hear the loud thumping heartbeat in his mind, and from its resonance could tell it was a male.

The sound made him eager.

As he started walking slowly toward the still-open front door, his body hunched so that the corpse’s heels dragged along the lawn after him, and he began to laugh.

A low, chilling laugh.

A laugh that would have sounded only partially human, had anyone been around to hear it.

11

LEGENDS FROM THE PAST

Later that evening, Sam found himself finishing his rounds at the nursing home earlier than usual. The patients were quiet that night, their requests relatively few, so that when he was done with his rounds he made his way down the hall to the last room on the left, eager to tell Gabriel the events of the morning.

Gabriel was expecting him and Sam quickly took his usual seat by the window. This time their roles were reversed as Sam told Gabriel of the morning’s events with Jake. Gabriel listened quietly throughout the telling, never interrupting, though he did lean forward with a surprising amount of interest when Sam was describing the condition of the statue they found in the tunnel. He shook his head sadly when Sam mentioned finding Kyle’s body, and for just an instant Sam thought he saw the wet glisten of impending tears in Gabriel’s eyes.

“Pretty amazing, don’t you think?” Sam asked, when he finally ran out of steam.

“Yes, indeed, Sammy. Quite a tale. Tell me, what do the police intend to do now?”

Sam thought about it for a moment and realized that he really didn’t know.Had the sheriff told Jake to stay away from the mansion, or was his friend intending to resume work on the renovations in the morning? He didn’t remember hearing any discussion about the issue, but figured that since it was a crime scene, the work would have to be suspended for at least a few days, and told Gabriel so.

“Seems you had quite an exciting morning, my young friend. So exciting that my story seems so dull and uneventful in comparison that I think we’ll just forget about it for tonight, don’t you think?”

Sam shook his head. “Not a chance, Gabriel. We have practically all night to talk, and there’s no way I’m going to miss one of your stories.” Every time Sam came to Gabriel’s room, the old man had a tale to tell, and they were always so incredibly interesting that Sam sometimes found himself looking at his own works with an air of resignation, his own story lines seemed so uninteresting in comparison.

Gabriel watched closely for a moment, as if gauging the sincerity of Sam’s reaction, then agreed with a smile.

“Tell me, Sammy, how do you think it was that man left behind the life of a wanderer and began to settle down in one location, changing from a society of hunter-gatherers to one of agriculture and domesticity?”

That was an easy one. Sam had learned the answer years before in secondary school. “As the great beasts began to die out, and man’s numbers started to swell, a more constant food source was required to survive. It became impractical to move large groups across such vast distances while following the herd animals, so they turned to a more stable food supply in the form of whatever crops they could grow.”

“And how did they learn to do that?” Gabriel asked.

“Well, ah, I suppose they just figured it out.”

It was a weak answer, and Sam knew it, but it was the only one he had. He’d never considered the question before, having taken the stock answer his schooling had taught him and leaving it at that.

He looked over at Gabriel, his eyebrows raised questioningly.

“I’ll tell you how they did it, Sam. They had help.”

“Help?”

“Yes, help. Help from a race of people who had come before them, and had learned to do it on their own. You see, your history books only tell you the basics. Of how man slowly adapted, leaving his ancestral ways behind. But that’s not really what happened. Did you really think humanity managed to do it all on their own?” Gabriel asked, and for the first time Sam heard something besides simple good cheer in his friend’s voice. For just a moment, he thought there was a touch of arrogance there, too.

“Long ago, before man ascended from his primal beginnings, there was another age, the Age of Creation it was called, and in this time other beings ruled the land. The wisest, gentlest of these were known as the Elders. They were the most important link in man’s transition from brutality to civilization. The Elders were human in appearance, so much so that if you were to pass one on the streets today you would see no difference. Your mind and your soul might notice something, for the Elderswere different. They were more civilized, more at peace with themselves and the world around them than any other race from then until now. If you were not completely anesthetized by the wonderless world in which you now live, you would recognize the differences between our races.”

Gabriel paused for a moment and in the silence Sam was struck by the odd notion that Gabriel was speaking of himself, that he had lived and walked among the Elders.

“They used harmony to create a vast civilization that spanned the globe. They raised cities of wonder, full of joy and light, whose sparkling towers reached for the heavens above with grace and spirit, and let all who saw them know that these were a people to be respected. A people to be loved.

“Some of the Elders took a liking to the apelike creatures that were man’s ancestors. Slowly their confidence was won with offers of food and other gifts. The Elders began to teach them, discovering early on that several of these beings had a rudimentary intelligence different from the other creatures of the wild. It quickly became a mission of the Elders to raise these creatures up from the level of the beasts around them and give them something more.”

Gabriel turned to face Sam, his eyes shining with intensity. His hand shot out from under the bedclothes and grabbed Sam’s wrist. “Think of it, Sam! A whole race devoted to bettering the lives of another. What hope they must have had! What joy! What a wonderful world to have lived in!”

His grip loosened, and Gabriel slumped back against the pillows. “That was to prove their undoing, their downfall.”

Sam was eager to hear more. “What do you mean, ‘their downfall’?” he asked. “Did man turn against them? Destroy them?”

“Not directly. You see, there was another race competing with the Elders for supremacy. These winged, vaguely reptilian creatures were the antithesis of the Elders, full of cruelty and rage, but no less intelligent. They preyed on the lesser races. They called themselves the Na’Karat, but it was their habit of swooping down out of a dark night sky to attack their prey that earned them the nickname, ‘Nightshades.’ They hunted many different kinds of creatures, but enjoyed hunting primeval humans more than any other type of game. Man had more intelligence, and therefore had a richer, deeper notion of fear, and it was fear that the Nightshades were after. They fed on the meat, but it was the fear that sustained them, fear that fulfilled their warped sense of spiritual need.

“Where the Elders sought to help the humans, the Nightshades wanted nothing more than to allow them to wallow in their primitiveness. They were cattle, nothing more, and the Nightshades treated them as such, herded and corralled and hunted for the sustenance they could provide.”

“So, what happened?”

“War happened, Sam. War. The Elders couldn’t sit idly by and watch this occur. They went to arms against the Nightshades and swore the conflict would not end until the humans were freed and allowed to prosper as befitted an intelligent race. Where once was peaceful coexistence, now was racial hatred. Vast armies marched out of our great cities.”

“Armies led by those who would later become legends—Michael, Uriel, even Gabriel—marched onto the fields of battle. Down out of the sky came the ’Shades to greet them, in numbers so vast the brilliant blue above was blotted out by their forms.”

Sam could see it all in his mind’s eye, his writer’s imagination filling in the details. He saw the armies of the Elders marching off to war, their raiment golden in the sunlight. He imagined heroic stands against incalculable odds, the armies of good triumphing over those of darkness, conveniently forgetting that war is never that simple or bloodless.

He realized suddenly that it had gone quiet. Gabriel was sitting and studying him. Sam felt uncomfortable under the intensity of that gaze, but he wanted to hear the end. “Who won?” he asked.

Gabriel smiled a tight, bitter smile in response. “No one won, Sam. Battle after battle raged, the best of both races lying to rot in the bright sunlight of fields strewn with the dead. Cities crumbled under the onslaught and the dark caverns of the Nightshades were taken and destroyed. The numbers on each side dwindled. Yet still they fought on in their stubbornness, the war continued not for the noble reasons it had begun but out of pure hatred and vengeance for all those who had fallen before. Every man, woman, and child on both sides joined in the struggle. Before long, what had once been a glorious civilization was a decrepit ruin. The few surviving members on either side saw the destruction and mourned for what had passed from the world. They kept on fighting until there were too few remaining for the races to survive. Both the Elders and the Nightshades dwindled in number, bled into extinction by their own foolishness. Out of the ashes of their conflict came man, for he had watched and learned as the battle raged. Freed from the one predator that had effectively culled their numbers, humans multiplied rapidly. The wisest of them remembered the lessons that the Elders had taught them and slowly led the others in that long climb toward civilization.”

At that moment Sam’s beeper went off, signaling that another patient somewhere on the floor needed him.

“Damn!” he swore, not wanting to leave.

As if sensing Sam’s thoughts, Gabriel smiled, and said, “Go on, Sammy. It’s all right. I’m sure we’ll speak of this again some other time.”

Sam thanked him for the story and slipped out the door, his thoughts on the Elders and the sacrifice they might have made for mankind had the tale been true.

Behind him, in that last, lonely room on the left, the final member of an all-but-forgotten race smiled another tired smile.

It was done.

The seeds had been sown.

All that was left was to see if they bore fruit.

After all that had happened that day, Jake didn’t feel like being alone. Sam was at work, so hanging with him and talking it all over was out of the question. While Sam was allowed visitors, especially during the night shift when no one else was around to tell him differently, Jake didn’t feel like making the forty-five-minute ride into Glendale.

A quick glance at his watch told him Katelynn would be home by then, so he turned his Jeep in that direction and drove across town to her place.

As he neared the top of her walk he realized that she was sitting in the large swing on her front porch.

“Hi. You look tired,” she said, as he sat down next to her.

“You have no idea,” he replied. “Hey, is that new?” He pointed to the red gemstone she wore on a gold chain about her neck.

“Sam’s friend, Gabriel, sent it over this afternoon with a note saying it was his way of saying thanks for spending time with him this morning. I called and told him I couldn’t accept something so obviously expensive, but he sweet-talked me into keeping it.” She smiled. “So what the heck. How did the morning go? What happened when the cops showed up?”

“That’s the weirdest part, Katelynn. The sheriff answered the call himself. Turns out he is a pretty decent guy. After taking down our story, he asked me to lead him underground to where we had found the body. We climbed through the hole Kyle made in the wall and found ourselves in a large stone chamber. Inside, Kyle’s body was lying at the feet of this massive stone gargoyle. Ugliest mother I’ve ever seen.” Jake shivered, remembering. “While the sheriff was looking at the body, I poked around and found another door on the side of the chamber. The whole situation must have gotten to me, because I opened it without even thinking about the fact I was disrupting a crime scene. The door led into the cemetery nearby. It turns out that the brick barrier in the tunnel was actually the rear wall of a mausoleum that belonged to Sebastian Blake, and the door I’d found was the outside entrance.”

Katelynn’s eyes gleamed with interest. “How do you know it is Sebastian’s tomb?”

“His name was carved right over the doorway.”

Katelynn thought about that for a few moments, trying to put it into perspective with what she already knew from her research. The wild story Gabriel had told her reared its head again, but she wasn’t ready to believe something that crazy.

At least not yet.

“A secret tunnel from the house leading to the family crypt? Sounds like one of Sam’s novels, Jake.”

“No kidding. The sheriff was ticked that I opened the door, but he got over it pretty quickly. I think he was as spooked as I was over the whole thing.”

“What do you think happened to Kyle?”

“I don’t know.” Jake chuckled. “Sam would probably tell you that an ancient curse had just arisen to claim its first victim.”

The two talked on for another hour before calling it a night, never realizing how close to the truth Jake’s comment had actually been.

12

BLOODSTONE

The dream begins innocently enough.

In her sleep, Katelynn moves through an amusement park with Jake at her side. Sights and sounds slip past in a kaleidoscope of activity. Flashing lights, turning wheels, the harsh bark of a carny’s voice. They ride the Tilt-a-Whirl, then the Viking Longboat. Jake wins her a teddy bear by knocking down milk bottles with a softball. It is a typical dream, skipping from scene to scene with no real continiuty, yet somehow making sense just the same.

Suddenly, a flashing red light intrudes from the other side of the carnival. A light so sharp, so insistent, that Katelynn is drawn irrevocably toward it. Jake fades into obscurity behind her as she moves out of his reach. The light draws her forward, and the cacophony on all sides slips away into oblivion as all of her attention is tied up in chasing that insistent beacon.

In reality, Katelynn tosses and turns beneath the sheets, the ruby red stone about her throat pulsing with light.

She sleeps on, and the carnival fades away, replaced by a thick gray haze that swirls around her in lazy spirals, shifting and churning. The light shines before her, even closer, hidden somewhere in the depths of that mist.

Katelynn stumbles in after it.

The haze shifts, and Katelynn finds herself standing before the light as it hangs motionless in the air before her. It shines vividly, cutting through the murk, pulsing with an eerie life. Katelynn watches as her arm lifts of its own accord and reaches to touch it…

She soars high above the ground, carried aloft like a glider tossed into a storm. The wind is cool, flickering across her flanks in a silken caress. The sky around her is dark with heavy rain-laden clouds extending out to the horizon, shutting out the afternoon light, for which she is thankful.

The storm comes on fast, without warning, and she rejoices in the opportunities it could bring.

She drops lower, riding one of the storm’s savage currents in a swift, sickening drop that plunges her several hundred feet in seconds, the air screaming past her ears with a shrill, bestial shriek. She recovers easily, swooping along just above the treetops, following the trail she sees below her, knowing that it was often used by those she sought.

Movement catches her attention.

She shifts lower, descending to mere feet above the ground, and angles off to the left in order to intercept whatever it is. A moment or two and the thing comes into view.

It is an antelope, with long curving horns atop its head and a brown-and-golden coat. It is part of a herd, which comes into view as she sails over the head of the first animal. Her presence starts them milling about, nervous but not panicked. As a group they collectively wait to see what she will do, watching her closely with upturned heads.

She has better sport this night, however, and she glides over their heads without giving them another thought.

She regains some altitude and uses the warmer currents to glide and detect movement on the plain beneath. A dark, scorched section of earth can be made out to the west, and she notes it with a sort of grim satisfaction. Her enemies once lived there, in a great sprawling city that stood as a fortress against her kind, but had finally fallen in a glorious battle. The streets of that city had flowed red with the blood from those fed upon that night.

Not long after she passed the city, she spotted what she was looking for. A thin column was moving along the path, at her height little more than specks in motion. She had hunted there before and knew that she had found her target.

She swooped closer, and counted fourteen of the herd moving in tandem the way the Elders had taught them. They found a certain level of protection in this fashion, occasionally managing to fend off an attack with the help of the four-legged animals that traveled with them. It didn’t happen often, but it also didn’t hurt to assess the situation before attacking.

Another of the Na’Karat was trailing the same group, she noticed, a large male, hanging off to the side, watching just as she was. From the haste of the group below, they had obviously seen him, and were trying to reach a sheltered location before he attacked.The fool, she thought.He allowed himself to be seen too soon and is now simply compounding the error. He will lose his chance if he doesn’t engage soon.

She decided to make her move before he could.

She flew overhead and began to circle the group. Below, the cattle swiftly pulled in their ranks, moving to form a large circle with the weakest in the center and the strong on the rim, just as the Elders had taught them.

It would do them no good.

She spotted a straggler, an offspring by its size, tens of yards away from the group and moving slowly. She smiled, her tongue flicking across her teeth. That would be the one.

She folded her wings and dropped toward the earth.

Her victim was twenty feet from the group when she struck.

Unfolding her wings, she used the resistance of the wind to slow her descent abruptly, so she seemed to appear out of nowhere directly in front of it. As expected, it froze in place for a moment.

That was all the time she needed.

She swung one of her arms around in a blinding fast arc, the talons on the end of each finger extended.

She shrieked with satisfaction as flesh tore, blood flew, and the stench of pain rose into the air…

Katelynn awoke screaming in her bed.

She knew instantly she’d had a nightmare; her heart was thundering in her chest, and her body was soaked with sweat.

She had only a fleeting recollection of what it had been about, however, and that quickly slipped away as she tried to get herself under control.

She got up and went into the bathroom. Using a face-cloth soaked in cool water, she wiped her upper body down and splashed some water on her face. Her heartbeat slowly returned to normal.

By the time she climbed back into bed, the dream was no more. It had slipped away as swiftly as the morning dew under the summer sun.

Five minutes later she was fast asleep.

It had been the first of the dreams, but it would not be the last.

Across town, the beast turned in its sleep, its dream disturbed by an unwanted presence.

It lasted no more than a moment, however, and the creature never fully awoke, preferring to sink back into its memories of another time and place.

It gave the presence not another thought.

13

GRUESOME DISCOVERIES

The ringing of the phone jarred him awake.

“Wilson here.”

“Sorry to disturb you, sir. But we’ve got a bad one.”

Damon listened for a few moments and hung up. He was dressed and out the door in less than ten minutes, using both the sirens and lights as he climbed the hills into Harrington Falls. As he made his way down Chestnut Street, it was easy to see the activity that surrounded the house at the end of the block.

The house was a beacon, shining in the darkness, calling out to him, demanding the justice he could supply, commanding him to avenge those who lay still and silent inside.

Though he was still half a mile away, he could see the house clearly. It stood out from the rest because it was the only one on the block with every window bathed with electric light, like a blazing torch in an empty field, and he moved toward it reluctantly.

The unspeakable had occurred. For the first time in over twenty years, there had been a murder in Harrington Falls.

Damon didn’t want to see what lie waiting inside those four walls, didn’t want to smell the freshly spilled blood or see the wounds, didn’t want to stare into lifeless eyes and wonder what they had seen in those last few precious moments before death.

Despite his resignation he continued on, if for no other reason than it was his job. There was no one else to do it.

He’d only gone to sleep moments before the call had come, and as he put down the receiver he realized he hadn’t been surprised to learn that someone had been killed. All evening since leaving the office he’d been nervous, watchful, unable to relax and settle down the way he usually did after a day’s work, his conversation with Strickland playing over and over again like a Top Forty record in his mind. It was almost as if he’d been expecting something to happen.

When he arrived, he could see that the house was set back from the street on a thickly wooded lot. In the drive were several police cars, their blue lights flashing, giving the house’s white paint a sickly glow. Two ambulances were parked at the curb.

The house was a split-level, as were many of the others in the neighborhood, though some work had been done subtly to alter its appearance. There was a small addition, probably a den or TV room, jutting out from the rear left corner, and from it a wide latticed porch extended around to its opposite corner on the front. The original windows facing the street had been taken out, and two large bay windows had been installed in their place, looking to Damon like the bulbous eyes of some giant fly.

The sheriff looked away, suddenly uncomfortable.

For just a moment, he was struck by the uneasy feeling that he was being watched.

His attention turned to the thick row of hedges that lined the path from the front door to the drive, and the manner in which the pines in the backyard crept across the rear of the property. Both areas would provide fine places for concealment for anyone trying to approach the house undetected, and he made a mental note to have the boys check them for any sign that the killer had indeed been there.

Deciding he couldn’t postpone the inevitable any longer, Damon resigned himself to what lay ahead and walked to the front door.

Inside was chaos.

The living room was in shambles. A recliner had been overturned, its leather upholstery slashed. Cushions from the sofa and love seat were strewn about the room, ripped as well, their white foam interiors spilling out around the jagged tears. It looked as if someone had taken the same knife to the heavy drapes too, as they hung in ragged strips. The floor was littered with chunks of ceramic and glass; all that remained of what Damon guessed had once been a pair of table lamps.

Two technicians were moving about the room, pausing now and again to scoop some object into one of the many clear plastic envelopes that jutted from their pockets.

One of them looked up and waved a hand in the direction the hallway was leading, and Damon followed it to a stairway that led to the second floor.

At the top, Deputy Frank Castiglioni stepped out of the shadows to greet him. Frank was a ten-year veteran of the department, and one of Damon’s most hardened and experienced officers.

“Sheriff,” he said in greeting.

“How’s it going, Frank?” Damon noticed that his fellow officer was pale, his voice slightly off key. Behind the man’s back, where he obviously hoped Damon wouldn’t be able to see it, Castiglioni’s right hand was shaking violently.

“Is it bad?” he asked.

The other man swallowed once, hard, and nodded. He tried a weak smile but failed to bring it off.

Damon laid a comforting hand on Frank’s shoulder, then moved past him. He stopped at the entrance to the room just beyond, his bulk framed in the narrow doorway.

What he saw in front of him made the bile rush to the top of his throat, and for a moment he thought he might be sick at a scene for the first time in many years, but after a moment or two the sensation passed.

“Holy Mother of God.”

What he saw was far, far worse than what he’d expected.

The room was a slaughterhouse.

Blood was splattered everywhere; on the floor, on the ceiling, on the walls. It was as if someone had taken buckets of the stuff and merrily splashed it around.

Pieces of bloody human flesh were likewise cast about, scattered across the floor and atop various pieces of furniture.

A hand, with only three fingers intact, its missing digits ripped off at the first knuckle, dangled from an open dresser drawer.

A foot, still clad in a bloodstained slipper, lay in the middle of the floor; the shinbone was shining whitely through the torn and bloody flesh.

Many of the other pieces were unrecognizable as to what part of the body they had originated from, a fact Damon found increasingly disturbing as his gaze kept returning to them repeatedly, his mind trying to discern what they once might have been, so as to give order to the chaos.

What he took to be glistening lengths of rope dangled about the curtains that concealed the surface of the king-size bed, reminding him of the tinsel he used to decorate his Christmas tree every year.

Curious, he stepped closer, only to realize with rapidly escalating horror that they were actually human entrails.

In the back of his mind an evil little voice began singing,“A Slinky, a Slinky, a wonderful, wonderful toy, a Slinky, a Slinky, they’re fun for a girl and a boy.”

Vomit surged back up into his throat, and he barely managed to choke it back down, leaving a foul taste in his mouth that matched nicely the reek of death that hung in his nostrils.

In all his years of police work, he had never seen anything so vile.

So twisted.

So undeniably evil.

Conflicting emotions ran through him as he stared down at the carnage before him, the sickness he felt warring with his need to study the scene and understand just what had happened.

Anger reared its ugly head, and he let it come, knowing it would help calm nerves that were dangerously close to the breaking point. Anger would get him past his revulsion, would allow him to look at the situation objectively. He clung to it, wrapping it around him the same way a child might envelop itself in a comforting blanket on a cold winter’s night.

I’ll make the bastard who did this pay,he vowed to himself, and felt a little better for the thought.

For the first time Damon noticed a police photographer in the room with him; he had indeed been clicking away the whole time Damon had been standing there, ignoring his presence, wanting to finish up and get the hell out of there.

Damon didn’t blame him.

“There’s more, boss,” a voice said from behind him. “The rest is worse, if that’s possible to imagine.”

Damon didn’t trust himself to speak, so he just turned to look at Frank.The rest of it? Worse? What the hell can be worse than this?

Castiglioni motioned the sheriff toward the bed, and Damon followed, his feet as heavy as cement blocks. He didn’t want to get any closer, didn’t want to see what his fellow officer had to show him, but duty compelled him to follow. Frank ducked under a low-hanging piece of intestine and drew back the dangling curtains, exposing the bed itself and what lay atop it.

Damon felt the breath sucked from his lungs at the sight.

A human corpse was on the bed, and from its musculature Damon could tell it had been a male. From its chest gaped a savage wound, and it was from there that the internal organs had been pulled and stretched forth to the canopy around them. If that wasn’t enough, the body had also been dismembered.

And beheaded.

The sheer brutality of the act was sickening. Damon hoped to God that the victim, whoever he had been, had been dead long before the killer had performed his grotesque artistry. To even contemplate what the man might have endured had he been alive was unthinkable; his mind balked at the very concept.

When he had recovered sufficient breath to speak, Damon asked, “Where’s his head?” He noticed that his voice trembled when he spoke, and wondered if Frank had noticed it, too.

Frank laughed, a strange eerie chuckle. Wilson instantly recognized it for what it was; the type of laugh you make to chase away the willies when you’re alone in an empty house in the dead of night. It was the sound of a man doing his best to reassure himself.

And miserably failing.

It was anything but comforting.

“In the bathroom,” Frank replied. He hesitated, clearly considering how much to say, then decided against saying anything at all, for he merely indicated once again that Damon should follow. The two of them crossed the room, to where a door stood next to the bureau.

It was not the extravagant master bath Damon had expected. An oval mirror hung over a marble sink. A toilet stood to his left, a claw-foot tub to his right.

Frank nodded at the open toilet.

Damon stepped over and looked down, peripherally aware that Frank had moved back out of the room.

The man’s missing head was stuffed in the toilet bowl, the once-blue-tinged water a sickly purple hue from the blood that had been spilled into it from the leaking neck.

The man’s white hair writhed about his head like living seaweed. His ghastly dead face was frozen in an expression of horror, his mouth open wide in a silent scream of pain, his empty eye sockets still leaking blood.

For just a split second, Damon’s mind told him it wasn’t real.

But it was.

And deep down inside, he knew it.

He turned away, unable to face that eyeless, accusing stare a moment longer, only to find he could still feel its gaze burning into his back.

“You poor bastard,” he muttered under his breath.

Numbed by all the destruction, he stood there for a moment, seeing himself in the bedroom mirror, his eyes reflecting the questions that were rushing around inside his head.

This was worse than anything he had imagined. That he was the best man to be in this position was beyond a doubt; the rest of the men on the force had never dealt with any type of violent crime. They were good, yes, but something like this was beyond the scope of their experience. They were deputies in a small town, and things like this just didn’t happen in a place like Harrington Falls. In the city it was different, and Damon knew that from too many years of personal experience.

Now he wondered if those years would be enough.

And then another, more chilling thought occurred to him.

What if the bastard killed again before they could stop him?

The thought of bodies piling up around him while the investigation floundered sent a stream of sweat rolling down his back, dredging up all the old concerns and self-doubts. The mountainous weight of responsibility settled about his shoulders like a leaden cloak, and he was suddenly more scared of failure than he’d ever been.

What if my best just isn’t good enough?he asked himself.

What then?

He forced his doubts away, knowing he needed to concentrate in order to get the job done. Frank was waiting for him in the bedroom.

Now that the initial shock had passed, Damon found he could think a bit clearer. He asked the first, obvious question, “The radio call mentioned two bodies. Where’s the other?”

Frank glanced away, uneasily. “Look around,” he directed, waving his hand about the room.

Damon did. All he saw were bits and pieces of flesh everywhere.

The implication of his officer’s words sank in slowly.

He turned to face him. “You mean…”

“Yeah. There’s not enough flesh missing from the male’s corpse to account for all this mess, so most of it had to come from the guy’s wife. We can’t find the rest of her body, though, so we think maybe whoever did this took it when he left.”

“We got an ID on the body yet?” Damon asked.

“Yeah, but it’s still unconfirmed. Some of the pictures in the house match this guy here, near as we can tell. George Cummings. We have to wait until the coroner does the prints to be sure, but I’d bet next week’s pay on it. We’ve got an APB out on the wife, just to be sure she isn’t the cutter and that it wasn’t some young bimbo that got chopped up with him.”

“Anyone call Strickland?”

“Yeah. Should be here any minute now.”

Damon nodded approvingly. His men were doing their jobs despite the atrocity around them, and of that he could be proud. “Okay then, let’s get out of here and let the techs do their jobs.” He waved Frank out of the room before him, and the other man seemed more than happy to oblige. Damon didn’t blame him; if he had to spend another moment in that room he thought he might scream. Back downstairs, the two of them gathered the other deputies who weren’t currently involved in securing the site from the crowd that was beginning to show up, and assembled them in a loose huddle by the patrol cars.

Damon began giving out assignments, doing his best to get the situation under control and the investigation rolling. There was no time to lose. He knew the cardinal rule of homicide investigations; most killers would be caught in the first forty-eight hours of the investigation, if they were going to be caught at all. When he was finished, one of the men raised his hand.

“What do we do about the press?” the deputy asked. “The local papers have got people already out there, mixin’ with the crowd and tryin’ to get inside. The TV crews can’t be that far behind.”

Damon swore under his breath. He knew he couldn’t contain this for long, but letting it out now would just cause panic in the streets. He thought hard for a moment. “Okay, listen up. I want all of you to keep your mouths shut on this one. If they get one hint about what we got upstairs, I’ll come down on every one of you, you got that? At the moment we’re the only ones who know how bad it is, and we’ve got to keep it to ourselves until the county executives can assemble a press conference in the morning. We don’t know if this is a one-timer or not, and we don’t need any other loony out there starting to act like a copycat. Keep the details to yourselves. If anyone asks, let ’em know we got a suspicious death and leave it at that. If anyone gives you any trouble, you send ’em direct to me, got it? Questions? Okay then, get to work.”

The men moved off to follow their orders, leaving Damon alone for the moment. He slumped against the side of his vehicle, suddenly drained. He stood there and stared out into the night, wondering about the killer.

Who is he? What does he look like?

More importantly, where is he now?

At the moment, Damon didn’t have any answers.

But he would discover them in time.

He had to.

14

A SUMMONS IN THE NIGHT

Midnight.

The night was still.

Hushed.

Expectant.

The moon hung low on the horizon, looming there as if poised on the edge of a long drop. Since it was early in its ascent, it filled the sky, a vast ball of incandescence that punched a hole in the night’s blackness.

Standing on his balcony, the smooth flagstones beneath his feet damp from the evening’s chill and glistening with the silvery blue light of the moon, Hudson Blake gazed out into that darkness, watchful and vigilant.

As he watched the darkness, he felt it watching him in return.

He sensed it was hungry.

Turning away, he reentered his study through the set of French doors that led to the balcony and crossed the room, picking up the withered journal that lay open on his desk. The book’s leather binding was stiff and laced with cracks, its pages fragile, yellow with age and neglect.

He read aloud the entry written on the open page.

“To summon the Beast, one must make a true and worthy sacrifice. An offering of that which is most precious to the denizens of the pit must be made swiftly and without hesitation. Once the blood has been shed, if ye be of sound mind and valor, ye must take up the Bloodstone in both hands, cupping it between the palms, with the left hand, the Hand of Vengeance, above the right, the Hand of Righteousness. Repeating the words of the unholy incantation contained herein, reach out with the very essence of thy now damned soul and call forth that which thou desirest.”

He’d read that passage more than a hundred times, and the words fell from his lips with the ease of long familiarity.

Having made a substantial study of ancient, mystical traditions, Hudson dismissed most of the text as bullshit. Such rituals were mainly for show, to bolster the performer’s image in the eyes of the uninitiated.

But as the best lies often contain a kernel of truth, so, too, did the description of the ritual contain the clues needed to bring it to its proper fruition. And in this instance, Blake was certain he had correctly identified them.

The remarks about the crystal were the key.

Carefully laying the book back on the desk, Hudson reached up under the collar of the shirt he wore and removed the necklace hanging about his neck. The dark stone that dangled on the end of the chain spun in the air like a pendulum, sending off tiny flashes of crimson whenever it was touched by the room’s light.

This was the crystal to which the journal had been referring.

The Bloodstone.

He stared at it now, wondering as always where his ancestor, Sebastian, had obtained it. Years earlier Hudson had shown it to several prominent jewelers. None of them had been able to identify the type of stone or its country of origin. Ever since, it had held a particular fascination for him, and he’d often gazed at it for long periods of time, attempting to unlock its secrets.

What he did understand was that it was the stone itself, not the ritual or its flowery incantations, that would allow him to communicate with the beast his ancestor had known as Moloch.

He held it up to the lamp, shining the light on its ruby surface. Deep inside the stone, he thought he could see movement.

His eyes narrowed as he looked closer.

There!Something had shifted position deep within its depths.

But what?

While he yearned for the answers, he knew they were really not all that important. Only what the stone would allow him to do was.

He leaned over the desk and reread the vital line in the journal.

“…reach out with the very essence of thy soul and call forth that which thou desirest.”

At first, the line had confused him.How does one reach out with the essence of one’s soul? But after a time he came to realize that he was seeking a deeper meaning than necessary, that the words needed to be taken in the literal sense. Medieval writers had seen the mind and the soul as one, so the passage was actually referring to the mind. Thus, reaching out with his soul really meant reaching out with his mind.

He believed that somehow the crystal channeled his thought patterns, much the same way an antenna will channel radio signals.

All that he had to do to reach Moloch was think about him.

It should be that simple.

He’d tried it before, however, without success. His failure with the stone and his inability to find the hidden vault had caused him to dismiss the entire legend of his ancestor’s winged familiar as so much fantasy.

But now that the vault had been found, he was convinced that the journal’s contents were true.

Maybe it was my doubt all along that prevented the connection.

The discovery of the body in the basement of Stonemoor had added fuel to the flames of his beliefs, and after getting all the information from Caruso that he could, he decided that there was only one possible explanation.

The journal was true; the beast did exist.

And with the death of that vandal, it seemed to have returned to the world after hiding itself for so long.

Not that he cared about the fool who had been killed; that wasn’t important. What was important was the fact that at last he’d be able to prove the family legends that had intrigued him all of his adult life. The end of his search was finally in sight.

His fingers itched to seize the power in their bony grasp.

He first learned of the beast’s existence when he’d found the journal years before, hidden in a niche in the fireplace in one of the mansion’s unused rooms. Upon reading it, Hudson scoffed at the information it contained, but later found himself irresistibly drawn back to its musty, yellowed pages again and again, his mind alight with the possibilities he saw there. It was in the journal that he also learned of his ancestor’s pact with the beast, and the awesome powers it employed for him. Dreaming of possessing such knowledge for himself, he set about to learn if what the journal contained was true.

Tonight he would finally know.

It was time to begin.

Dangling the crystal from one hand by its slim gold chain, he moved to the center of the room.

On the floor at his feet rested a number of objects. Considering what he was about to do, he decided to take certain precautions.

Blake was not a deeply religious man and never had been. When he was younger he scoffed at the idea of God and his army of heavenly hosts. Likewise, if there was no God, then there was no Satan, and no demonic army with which to corrupt man from the salvation that supposedly awaited him.

As he’d grown older, he discovered the power that a religious leader can hold over his followers, particularly religions of a darker nature. He joined one after another, studying the craft, learning from those above him before ruthlessly replacing them, taking their power for his own. All those years had slowly but surely convinced him that there was some truth to what the leaders preached. He had become convinced that there was another realm of reality separate from our own, which could be tapped into with the right methods. It didn’t matter what you called it; the supernatural realm, the astral plane, the Other Side, whatever. It was there. Waiting to be made use of. Of that he was certain. Once he made this concession, it was only a short step to believe that this other realm was populated by beings of which man has little knowledge. Hudson felt it was encounters with creatures from the Other Side that had led man to invent religion. After all, what was religion but the attempt to explain that which man feared and didn’t understand?

Although he still scoffed at the old rituals with their trappings of mysticism and their elaborate schemes to protect the summoner from the very powers he sought to invoke, he did not abandon them entirely. After all, what if there was some validity to them? Could he take the chance and leave himself vulnerable to the very creature he sought to summon and harness for his own use?

No.

That would be foolish, and Hudson Blake was anything but a foolish man.

He replaced the crystal around his neck so that he would have both hands free. Shedding the long, black robe he was wearing, he carefully folded it and laid it aside. He took up a small clay bowl in both hands and moved to the open floor space immediately in front of the French doors.

He held the bowl upright in front of him at arm’s length as if in silent supplication, remaining that way for several long moments.

Lowering his arms, he dipped his left hand inside and took up a handful of the fine white salt that filled the bowl. He knelt on one knee and slowly began to let the mixture fall from his grasp to form a smooth, unbroken line on the floor. Once his hand was empty he repeated the process, inching backward as he went, bit by little bit, until a circle was laid out around him.

Satisfied, he stepped out of the circle, carefully avoiding making contact with the powder so its integrity as an unbroken circle would remain intact, and returned to the small pile of objects a few feet away.

Bending, he picked up a small cage and a leather-wrapped parcel of considerable length. A large black cat lay curled inside the cage and hissed warily as he lifted the cage, watching him with liquid green eyes that accused without words.

Blake grinned.

He hated cats. Always had. He went out of his way to use them in his rituals, taking a sadistic delight in ridding the world of as many of the foul little beasts as he could. With the two objects in hand, he reentered the circle, again carefully stepping over the boundary, and moved to the center, setting the cage at his feet.

He unwrapped the second object, tossing the covering it had been wrapped in outside the circle. The sword swept free of its scabbard with a soft reptilian hiss, and the sound of the steel scraping against the leather sent the blood quickening in his veins. This was the part of the ritual he liked best, and so he waited a few minutes, letting the anticipation he was feeling build until it was a raging river surging against the mental dam of his will.

When the time was right, when his excitement had reached the proper fevered pitch, he straightened and raised the weapon aloft.

Naked, with the moonlight rippling across the silver-blue steel of the blade and a light breeze stirring the edges of his hair like the touch of unseen phantom fingers, Hudson Blake began to sing.

The song started as a low murmur, the sound of the wind whispering through the river reeds, but it built with power as he went, getting louder, stronger, until it grew into the roar of a thousand voices all crying out at once.

In the midst of this, he withdrew the cat from its cage. It hissed and spat at him, scratching his forearm with its claws, but he ignored the attacks. He made certain he had a firm grip beneath its forelegs and held it out at arm’s length, away from his body, still singing all the while.

He drew the sword over his shoulder until he could feel the soft kiss of the blade against the bare flesh of his lower back.

Suddenly, abruptly, he stopped singing.

The silence was thick with tension, the air in the room seeming heavier than when he’d begun, filled now with a vibrant energy.

The cat met his gaze with its own.

Understanding passed between them.

The sword came whistling down, cutting through the air with an eerie shriek.

The cat’s severed head fell at Blake’s feet with a soft, wet sound.

Blood sprayed from the stump of its neck; a hot crimson fountain that splashed Hudson’s face and upper body.

Moving quickly, he held the sword beneath the cat’s upended corpse, turning it like a spit on a barbecue so that the entire blade was covered with blood before the river stopped. When the blood ceased to flow, he tossed the corpse across the room.

With the dripping blade he unhesitatingly traced a pentagram inside the boundaries of the circle he had created earlier. According to custom, as long as he remained inside the symbol he would be safe from harm.

Not being the type to risk everything on one toss of the dice, however, Blake stepped clear of the circle and retrieved the last object he’d left on the floor. The Smith & Wesson felt satisfyingly heavy in his hands.

He hoped he wouldn’t have to use it.

Returning to the circle, Blake laid the pistol down between his feet. With his other hand he thrust the sword point first into the floor in front of him so that it stood upright without any support.

He knelt and meditated for several moments, clearing his mind of all extraneous thought.

When he was ready he reached up, cupped the Bloodstone between both palms, and called out with his mind into the dark night, summoning the beast to his side.

15

A WITNESS IN THE DARK

On the other side of town, something stirred.

Moloch awakened slowly, ponderously, like a dragon aroused from its enchanted slumber.

He blinked his yellow, catlike eyes, once, twice, three times.

A voice was calling to him in his mind, a voice he didn’t recognize.

If it had been the old man, he simply would have ignored it, having already decided he would deal with the old fool when the time was right. But this wasn’t the Elder, nor one of his own kind.

So who then?

As far as he knew, the old man and he were the only survivors of the Age of Creation.

Therefore, it had to be a human.

The notion filled him with mild amusement.

Curious, he closed his eyes and relaxed, sloughing off the earthly restraints imposed on his body, sending his awareness soaring out into that dark realm that separates this world from the next; that place out of time, out of space, where the physical laws of reality no longer have any meaning.

In that realm he was free to travel wherever he willed, and he used the summons as a beacon, homing in on it, following it to its source.

What he saw there surprised and delighted him.

It also aroused his hunger.

Taking to the sky, he headed in that direction.

In her dream, Katelynn was standing in the cemetery.

It was late at night.

The moon was hanging in the sky, a baleful eye in the darkness. Its cold blue light touched the edges of the gravestones around her, sending their long, solemn shadows across the dew-wet grass in perfect rank and file, reminding her of an army standing watchful and still.

A grim, motionless army.

The air was heavy with their silence.

Feeling this silence all about her, Katelynn grew afraid.

Without knowing why, she began to run, slipping in and out between the gravestones as she raced desperately across the wet grass. Her heart was thumping wildly, and the need to scream rose dangerously in her throat.

She managed to stifle it in time, knowing that if she let it loose, he would hear her.

That thought startled her and brought her up short in her headlong flight to lean against the nearest tombstone.

He’ll hear me?she asked herself, with a moment’s rational thought.Who will hear me?

She didn’t know. But she did know he was there.

Behind her. In the darkness.

Coming for her.

She had to get away!

A whimper of fear escaped her lips as she pushed away from the headstone and began running again.

The silence behind her changed, became the silence of fear, thick and lazy.

The air grew colder.

She had the unmistakable feeling he was closer by then, relentlessly closing the distance between them, and she glanced around frantically, knowing he was out there but unable to find him.

And then she fell.

The night grew still.

Even the trees seemed to be holding their breath, standing immobile, frozen in place.

The light breeze that had been blowing moments before suddenly died.

The crickets stopped their singing.

From where he knelt in the middle of the floor, Hudson Blake opened his eyes and looked around the room.

He was alone.

But he didn’t expect to remain that way for long.

The beast was coming…

The feeling that someone was nearby, watching, struck him suddenly, and he instinctively cringed, reacting to the presence on a primal level, intuitively aware of the nearness of danger.

Coming… coming… coming…

His mind screamed at him to run, but he remained where he was, believing he was safe as long as he stayed within the confines of the protective circle he’d created. He grasped the stone tighter between his hands, his knuckles leeched white from the effort, and repeated the name again and again in his mind, calling out to him.

Moloch…

Moloch…

Moloch…

Abruptly, he realized he was no longer alone.

The warmth of life slowly seeped from his frame as he saw the shadow that fell on the wooden floor, the shadow of the large hulking beast that crouched on his balcony rail, its wings swept wide in the moonlight.

Blake could only mutely stare as icy terror swept over him with the swiftness of a cyclone, but it was too late for thoughts of escape.

Moloch had arrived.

The dream shifted, wavered, then coalesced.

No longer in the cemetery, she found herself standing on a railing. Behind her a thirty-foot drop over the balcony stretched away to the ground below. A pair of open French doors faced her, and through them she could see an older man kneeling naked in the middle of the floor. His chest and face were stained with a dark, crimson crust.

Dried blood, she realized, as its tangy aroma reached her nostrils. Her mouth twisted into a wide, cruel grin.