You recited the words.


You made the sacrifice.


You called the thing back to the form of life.


You were only passing through then, in summer, but the house called to you.


The boy called to you, as well.


And even the blood, when it spilled, called out your name.


Maybe if you’d done it right that summer night, maybe it would be under control.


Maybe there’d have been no leakage.


Spillage.


Seepage.


A shred of something – like ash – taken on the wind from a fire and spread out to others. It leaks and seeps and slowly touches with whispered promises and the dreams that come from within its depths.


You cannot sacrifice the dead to bring the dead back.


Such sacrifice only makes the dead hunger for the living.


You intended to move on before morning, you meant to travel far away with life restored to the one you loved; and the great gift was within you; but all of it called you back as if it owned you -- as if you were slave to brick and stone and wood from the moment you recited the words and tasted the blood of the sacrifice.


You journeyed to distant places, but all the while, it called you.


Because the ash from your fire blew with the wind and entered homes and gardens and backyards and places where even the smallest insect moved – and it even reached you again, nearly a thousand miles away, tapping you on the shoulder, the hint of a whisper seeping into your mind, “Do not abandon me, Nightwatchman.”

PART ONE

The Dark Place

Chapter One


1

“I feel like we’re lost,” Lizzie said.

“How can we be lost?”

“If you told me we were about a ten minute drive from my home, I’d say you must be crazy.”

“ Babe, I thought you knew where this place was.”

“From the front I do. Well, I know the main roads up here. Just not this back way. It’s too dark. I can barely see the road sometimes. And we so had to come the back way because?”

“Because we’re breaking the law,” the guy in back said.

“We’re not breakin’ any laws, dude.”

“Try checking out one of these ‘no trespassing – violators will be prosecuted’ signs.”

“Do people actually ever pay attention to those?” Alex, in the front seat, asked. Then added with a snort, “Oh, I keep forgetting. You’re a geek. Geeks never trespass.”

Beyond the windshield, the haze of the headlights interrupted the absolute darkness along an indigo road curving between thick woods and a thin sliver of moonless sky. A faint roll of thunder, distant and nearly indistinct, was met nearly a minute later with a brief flash or two of heat lightning from some far-off place.

The breezeless dark breathed heat and damp down upon them; through a crack in the windshield, it seemed to seep into the car’s faulty air conditioning, and touch them with that wilting feeling – that sense of the hothouse river stink that sometimes passed through on steamy summer nights. It brought a drowsy peace to the night, like a déjà vu of other humid June nights when the crickets and the cicadas fell silent, when anything might happen and many things would.

The three teenagers rode in the slightly rundown ’98 Chevy Malibu that Lizzie’s twin sister had bought it with money saved from a variety of odd jobs she’d had since she was fourteen.

The car was on loan that night to Lizzie under oath that she wouldn’t drive anywhere that might damage the car (like the bumpy road they were currently driving, and certainly not with three six-packs of lukewarm Budweiser in the trunk) and so long as not a drop of alcohol touched Lizzie’s lips.

So far, Lizzie, who was nearly eighteen, had kept this promise, but she was fairly sure she’d break it once they reached the party.

She also had decided that she’d waited long enough, and this would be the night. Half of her friends had already done it with their boyfriends, and she was beginning to wonder if something wasn’t wrong with her for not having allowed much more than a grope and a feel to the two guys she’d dated so far. And Lizzie was also fairly certain that boys just didn’t want girls who put them off too much. She was fairly sure that Dan Favreau had dumped her sophomore year just because she wouldn’t do more than make out.

I will become a woman tonight. I will give myself body and soul to him.

To Alex.

She had prepared herself. She had gone with her friend Bari right after their fifth period class, over to the pharmacy three blocks from school in Parham, and bought some condoms. Bari had said, “You know, they don’t sell these things at our local drugstore..”

“That’s why half the village gets pregnant by sixteen,” Lizzie laughed, and then remembered something about her sister and just couldn’t laugh about it.

But she was ready now.

She had waited long enough.

She knew that it might be a mistake to trust Alex, but she loved him and she wanted to just get it all over with as soon as possible. It wasn’t like it would hurt her rep in school, because Alex had already told her buddies they’d done it, and as much as it pissed her off that he’d be such a jerk, it at least meant that she wasn’t doomed to be a virgin-by-legend forever.

Tonight, we’ll make it real.

The guy she’d had to bring with them, the guy in the backseat, was a logistical problem, but she figured she and Alex could find some private spot somewhere that night. She’d already got her alibi going with her sister, Ronnie (although Ronnie had told them that they’d get caught one way or another), and she wasn’t expected home until the next day – probably not ‘til noon.

But driving the car with Alex next to her, she began to wonder if she really could go through with it. There he was, already stinking of his third beer, making fart jokes, blasting the music too loud, and now and then trying to feel her up when he thought she wouldn’t notice.

“I guess we turn left here,” Lizzie said, after switching the car stereo off.

“No, right,” Alex said. “Right. Right. The right of righteousness. See?” He pointed to the handscrawled directions as if she could lean over and read it.

The car light was on inside, and it made Lizzie feel as if they were being watched by the darkness around them.

“This is like one of those ghost stories,” Alex said.

“What?” Lizzie asked, exasperation barely concealed in her voice.

“You know. I heard this story where people are driving this kind of lone country road late at night. And they see someone by the side of the road.”

“Nobody’s by the side of the road here,” the guy in back said.

“I know, but it would creep me out if we saw somebody out here. Hey, favorite group?” Alex asked, after he’d made sure of his rightness in picking the right-hand curve of the road as their direction of choice.

“I love Smashing Pumpkins,” the guy in backseat said. “My dad has these old CDs that just blow me away. I think the ‘90s are my favorite era. Musically.”

“For me, The Strokes,” Alex said. “For classics, Nirvana.”

“The Yeah Yeah Yeahs,” the guy in the back said. “I love their stuff, too.”

“I like some of their stuff,” Alex said, and glanced at the road ahead, and then said, “It’s like Halloween out here.”

“Halloween in June,” Lizzie said.

“I mean the movie.” Alex reached up and flicked off the light within the car. “All this backwoods crap reminds me of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

“Shut up,” Lizzie said.

“You ever see it?” Alex asked the guy in back.

“Sure.”

“You like it?”

“I guess. I like the first one best.”

“Not me. The chick in the second one’s hot. Tell you what I’d do if I ever came across anybody like that.”

“Don’t tell me,” Lizzie said. “You’d molest her.”

“Ha. No. I mean the bad guy. Anybody with a chainsaw comin’ after me,” Alex said. “I’d kick out his frickin’ legs and then I’d grab the chainsaw and cut him in two.” He let out a throaty laugh dried out by too many cigarettes.

The twin high beams that captured the trees and the stretch of road only reached several feet ahead of the car.

“I didn’t know it would be this dark out here,” Lizzie said. “I mean, I knew it would be dark. But not like this.”

“Dark of the moon,” the guy in back said.

“I love Pink Floyd,” Alex said.

“Take the fork,” the guy in the back who nobody knew that well but knew the roads up to the house well, so they assumed he knew what he was talking about.

“What the hell does that mean?” Alex asked.

“Take it,” he said, and pointed ahead to the left. “The fork in the road. Always means left. The other way is just straight.”


“No,” Lizzie said. “One way’s left, one way goes right. ‘Taking the fork’ means crap.”

“You ever see Wrong Turn?” Alex asked, leaning into Lizzie, nuzzling her neck. “I wonder if inbred rednecks live out here. With hatchets and shit.”

“I saw it,” the guy in back said. “It was pretty good.”

“Pretty good? It was frickin’ awesome,” Alex said. “What about The Ring?”

“I liked the original.”

“It was stupid,” Alex said. “A chick comes out of the TV all wonky. BFD, says me.”

“It was brilliant,” the guy in back said.

“Well…” Alex said, letting the word trail off. “I guess if you think a chick with lots of hair coming out of a TV set is brilliant, then, yeah, it was a goddamn masterpiece. She wasn’t very hot. Now, the chick in The Grudge. She was hot.”

“Buffy,” Lizzie said. “I love her.”

“Sarah Michelle Geller,” the guy in back said. “She’s great.”

“Hot chicks are always great,” Alex said. Reached over and touched the back of Lizzie’s neck. “If we were in a movie right now, I’d play the hero, you’d be the hot babe, and the guy in back here would be the expendable one. You know, the one who always gets killed because he’s not a movie star.”

“Or they’d make the movie and kill off the famous actor. Like in Scream where they killed Drew Barrymore in the first ten minutes,” the guy in back said.

“Well,” Alex said. “First off, you’re wrong. They didn’t kill her first. They killed the guy playing her boyfriend first, and he was just the guy in the backseat, basically. I mean, if you want to get all technical about it.” Under his breath, Alex said, “geek.”

The car started coughing up dust as soon as they hit the unpaved road to the left.

“Why’d we have to come out at midnight?” Lizzie asked.

“Why you think?” Alex asked.

“Because only stupid people go to haunted houses at night,” the guy in back said.

“It’s not haunted,” Lizzie said. “I mean, nothing’s haunted.”

“You ever been there?”

“No way,” she said. “But I’ve heard about since I was a kid. Why aren’t we having the party at the Point? It’s always at the Point.”

“The Point is old,” Alex said. “The Point is for babies.”

“I like the Point. I like it. You get to skinny dip. I thought you’d like that, too,” Lizzie said. “And at the Point, you can make a big bonfire. And you can dance all night.”

“We can dance all night here if you want, babe,” Alex said looking to the guy behind him. “You probably been here a few times, right? Keggers with the goths?”

“Maybe,” the guy in back said. “It’s creepy as hell, believe me. It has a rep for being a real house of horrors.”

“House of whores, more like it. I bet you jack off there,” Alex said, chuckling. “I bet you go to horror movies and jack off, too.”

“Shut up,” Lizzie whispered, and then barely audible, her teeth clenched and less than a whisper emerging from between her lips: “He’s my sister’s friend.”

“Come on,” Alex said. “Everybody does it. You do it. I do it. Your mom does it.”

“Gross,” Lizzie said, but giggled a little. “Oh. Disgusting.”

“Not much else to do in a dead place like this,” Alex said. “Hey,” he turned to glance at the guy. “What you do for fun out here? I mean, I guess you could hop a train and go somewhere else. But what do guys like you do for fun?”

The guy in the back said, “I guess in Parham, everything’s hotter than a monkey in shit.”

Alex snickered. “I’m just teasing you. I think your town’s cool. I think even these backroads are cool. Hell, I once jacked off at Alien Versus Predator.”

“Gross,” Lizzie said. “Is that all guys talk about? Where they jacked off? Am I going to spend the rest of the summer hearing shit like this?”

“I did it in class one time,” Alex said. “Right in front of Mrs. Armpit-Hair. She was going over the French Revolution. I had a little revolt of my own going on. I put my head in my guillotine and just made it go up and down a lot. I had my shirt-tails out, so nobody could really see anything. I just unzipped and…”

“Okay, enough,” Lizzie said.

“No, it’s a cool story,” Alex said. “It was sort of uncontrollable and then Mrs. Armpit-Hair calls me up to the front to go over something about some French guy and I’m like, ‘I can’t come up there ‘cause I already came up here’.”

“That’s your cool story?” Lizzie asked. She pulled the car over, and put it in park. “That story is one of the grossest…and I think you made it up. And it’s offensive.”

“Hey, being offended is so bogus, Lizzie.”

“Funny how only people who are offensive think that.”

“Well, Joe Davison laughed his ass off when I told him.”

Lizzie started the car up again, cursing under her breath.

“Nobody’s got a sense of humor anymore,” Alex said. He drew a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. “Smokes?”

He offered the pack to the guy in back, who passed on them. Alex lit one up and it nodded up and down between his lips as he spoke. “I don’t know how you guys don’t smoke. It’s like you have a little tension, you pop in a smoke, and before you can say ‘jack-shit,’ all tension’s gone.”

“Maybe it’s the whole lung and heart problem,” the guy in back said.

“Eh, I’ll deal with it when I’m fifty. And that’s a long time from now. Anyway, who wants to live that long? I want to go out fast and furious and with a smoke in my mouth and a mouth on my--”

“Window down, Alex,” Lizzie said. “Alex. Alex.”

“But we lose the air conditioning.”

“Down,” she said. “It’s Ronnie’s car. I don’t want it smelling like an ashtray.”

Alex brought the window down a bit. “My favorite horror movie of all time is probably The Exorcist. I begged my mom to let me see it when I was ten, and she wouldn’t, but I snuck it out of the video store and watched it really late one night. I had nightmares for months. It was…oh damn…it was like a big fat boner of a movie.”

“You jack off during that one?” Lizzie asked.

“Hardy-har-har. Baby, what’s yours?”

“I don’t know,” Lizzie said, hesitating as she slowed the car down along a particularly bumpy patch. “I don’t really like those kinds of movies much. I like that one with Nicole Kidman. The one about where she was all uptight in a house back in a war and there were things going on in the house. Come on, Alex, you know that movie. What’s it called?”

“The Others,” the guy in back said.

“Thank you,” Lizzie said, glancing in her rearview mirror at the guy.

“Hey, you,” Alex turned around, cigarette bobbing. “What about you?”

“I don’t know. Alien was pretty scary, I guess.”

“Yeah, hmm, that’s true,” Alex turned back around and slipped his hand between Lizzie’s legs. She reached down and flicked his hand away.

“I like a lot of John Carpenter’s movies, too.”

“Halloween?” Alex said. “My fave’s Halloween III. With that song in it.”

“Sure. But more like The Thing.”

“Holy mother of shit,” Alex said, nearly spitting his cigarette out.

“What’s wrong?” Lizzie asked.

“This guy and me, we got way too much in common,” Alex said. He puffed the last of his cigarette, letting the ash fall on his jeans, and then flicked it out the window. “I loved The Thing. I mean, loved it. I saw it like ten times. Kurt Russell. I mean, that Thing.”

“I loved The Shining, too.”

“Oh yeah. Classic Nicholson. ‘Give me the frickin’ bat!’” Alex said, chuckling. “Doesn’t get much better than Nicholson. And that kid. Chillin’, that kid. And those little bug-eyed girls. And that bitch in the tub. Holy crap. But here’s the thing about horror movies. They always have these stupid people doing stupid things. I mean, ultimately. You don’t go after your kitty-cat if the alien is on the ship. I mean, screw the kitty. Right? You don’t go doing the laundry when a damn killer’s on the loose. That kind of stuff. Texas Chainsaw – you don’t go to the rundown place with human teeth on the ground and stick around.”

A passing moment of silence in the car while they heard the shriek of what must have been some kind of night bird. Then, Alex pointed off to the left.

“You see that?”

“What?”

“A kid. Standing there,” Alex said. “By the side of the road. He was just standing there. Staring at us. Staring.”

Buy the Book Now

« THE NIGHTMARE CHRONICLES | EXCERPTS | AFTERLIFE »