The Invocation:

Sing to me, Falconer, of what was and what shall be. Blow the victory ram's horn and recall the destiny to which you were so cruelly taken.

How you came to us in the night of your soul's despair, on the rocky ledges and fallen citadels of the Eastern Kingdoms. Roar the story of the warrior-youth from the West, who came to plunder the treasures of Antioch and Kur-Nu and was himself plundered...

PART ONE

THE FOREST

CHAPTER ONE

THE WORDS OF THE BLOOD

1

Mortal life is an echo of footsteps heard in the halls of the dead. Despite the adventures glimpsed at Death's Threshold, we turn toward life, as if that echo were all.

Within life, the blood is sustenance, the flesh is our cloak, but it is the breath that is the life – of eternity – itself.

2

Long before my birth, and well before my initiation into the mysteries of vampyrism, there were prophecies written in blood on a parchment made of human skin. These were rolled, as a scroll might be, bound in goatskin, placed in an urn, and then sealed.

Servants of the fallen ones buried the urn beneath the earth to protect its secrets. The servants were slaughtered, with the last taking his own life, so that no one might ever know of the prophecies and the power they possessed.

The earth itself wished to learn of the urn's secrets, and so after many years, the earth crushed the urn. Dirt and crawling insects spilled across the words of blood.

From this earth, grain grew, and whispered the words to the air.

One who harvested the grain heard the words as wind swept the grasses. This man came to know the power within the words of the Blood, and became a great priest of his tribe, and when he passed to the Threshold that exists between life and death, he returned to life and raised up a kingdom of his own. He had many daughters in his former life, and they grew in power themselves, stolen from him and from the shades that gathered to those who held the power of one called Medhya, who had made the prophecies with her own blood, and the parchments were her own flesh.

She had been a great queen of a distant country that the ancients called Myrryd, which now lies somewhat in northern Africa and in the sea, for it is one of the Fallen Kingdoms of the world.

Medhya had power and wisdom in her youth. It was said that the Serpent, which was sacred to her land, told her the secrets of the earth and of immortality, stolen from the lands beyond the Veil.
With this illicit knowledge, she brought about prosperity and heaped all manner of blessings on her people. Three distinct priesthoods grew about her as her kingdom grew to encompass many kingdoms – the Myrrydanai, the Kamr, and the Nahhashim, to gather worshippers to her throne.

But she grew corrupt with her immortality, and became a tyrant to her followers. When foreign invaders finally destroyed the thousand years of Myrryd, her priests discovered the source of her immortality, and stole it for themselves.

They took her flesh from her, to wear as a cloak, and her blood to drink, leaving only her shadow, which was dark as midnight.

The ones called the Nahhashim preserved her words in her blood, on her sun-dried skin, as her shadow lingered with them, whispering prophecies that maddened them and brought them death when her whispering was done. A tree grew among their graves, and from it a flower with juice that was poison. From the tree, a staff was cut, and the priests called the Kamr, who likewise drank of Medhya’s blood, took the seed of the flower and the priests called Myrrydanai tasted of her flesh.

But the prophecies were unknown to them, and the shadow of Medhya was upon them, both a curse and a powerful force.

The first prophecy told of the days to come when the blood would sing within the cupbearer, and all who had drunk of the cup would know her secrets.

The second prophecy spoke of a great bird that would come to devour the snake and so become a dragon and raise up the Fallen Ones of Medhya.

And the third prophecy of that terrible and powerful immortal was that the bloodline of Medhya would drink the blood of the dead and dying until All became the One, and the One, All.

There was one more prophecy, but the one who heard the words on the tips of wind-blown grain did not reveal it. All that anyone would know of it was that it spoke of a great war that would be like no other, between those of the blood, and those of the flesh, and it would return Medhya to her place of power.

There are those who say Medhya walked the earth for many thousand years more, calling for her flesh, weeping for her lost blood and for the children of her children, cursing those who stole the source of her power, searching for a doorway from the world of shadow into the world of flesh. She is nothing but shadow by day, and by night, she is the whispering darkness itself.

Against her will, but from those who stole her blood and her secrets, the race of vampyres was born, from the Curse of Medhya and her Sacred Kiss, which both drinks, resurrects the flesh, and passes the soul from mouth to mouth.

She seeks those who stole her secrets.

She hunts the night to bring hell to her children.

She is the mother of the tribe of vampyres, and the one who wishes to bleed them for eternity.

These prophecies and this legend were unknown to me until after my nineteenth year, when a vampyre named Pythia took me.

3

When she murdered me, her sharp canine teeth savaged my throat. I can still remember the pain: it was the pain of birth. I saw a vision of shadows in darkness, as of men of some authority gathered around, shadow against shadow. I felt my blood rise up to the bite, as if meeting Pythia’s lips and tongue. The smell of her – at that instant – was the musky perfume of the grave itself.
Her beauty changed from the maiden to that of the corpse, the drying leather of skin pulled taut against her skull.
I saw her as she was. I saw her for her flesh and not for her spirit. Her eyes opened, milky white and diseased.
Her jaw, wolf-like, as she tore into me. Her weight, heavy on my chest. I froze, paralyzed, unable to fight, and then the awful sucking sounds as she drank me.

I remember the beat of my pulse, as if it were a heavy, slow knocking at a wooden door nearby.

I saw her true beauty, as the life poured from my veins into her mouth. Her eyes, like burning sapphires. Her hair, thick, dark as night, flowing from her alabaster face, and then the flush of pink in her cheeks as my blood nourished her.

She became my mother, and my lover, and my savior, and my murderer, and my demon.

It was not intense pleasure I felt then, in the Sacred Kiss that burned on my lips.
The pleasure came after, when I experienced my first resurrection. The pleasure of opening myself up to the night, to creation itself, to the flesh in full.

The pleasure arises when the body comes fully alive again.

When the thirst for blood begins.

The curse of the thirst is not the thirst itself, but of the memories it stirs. Each drop of blood brings forth, once more, the memory of my mortal life.

Red is for remembrance.

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Prologue


1

In the testing room, the boy stared at the others from behind the glass. He raised his fists and began hitting the thick pane. His cries for help were unheard by the others. The flames shot up in the booth around him, moving rapidly up the boy’s back as he pounded harder, his mouth open impossibly wide. He shut his eyes as if trying to block it all out or to send his mind to another, safer place.

“We need to get out,” a teenager said. “Now.”

And then, the fire shattered the glass, moving beyond the booth, beyond the testing room, as if the air itself burned out of control.

2

In the 1970s, rumor went that a small, privately funded school in Manhattan existed where young children with special talents were being observed and tested for what were then labeled "PSI" abilities. Little is known about the school, other than it remained enshrouded in the urban legends of the city. The conspiracy theory was that the government or several governments funded the school and used it to learn more about the human mind, about child development with extra-sensory ability, and perhaps in some covert way. Another story was that it was simply formed by a group who believed that these so-called "special children" should have a safe place to develop their talents. Still, another suggestion had been that this was one of the city's many small private schools that didn't contain a trace of the psychic or the occult, but that some of the former students themselves spread that rumor as a joke to discredit the school.

One of the rumors about it had to do with a little boy who had precipitated the closing of the secret school when he somehow was responsible for the death of another child.

Other than hints in Rolling Stone, in the Village Voice, in New York Underground News, and even now, an occasional mention of the school on the Internet, nothing substantiated this tale, which some thought had grown out of the drug culture and the increasing interest in the paranormal during the ‘60s and ‘70s.

The school was supposed to have existed somewhere near the Chelsea District of New York City, although its exact location was anyone’s guess.

The school was called Daylight.

PART ONE

1

She opened her eyes to darkness. Her breathing: slow, warm, but too shallow. Something was wrong. Blindfolded? Not sure. She pressed her eyes closed and then open again. Nothing but a claustrophobic night. Her breath came back at her – an enclosed space. A feeling of dizziness, and pins and needles feelings in her toes and fingers. Paralyzed?

Buried. Buried alive.

Throat dry. A thudding – her heartbeat? No light at all. Not even cracks through the box. Coffin? A large trunk? She was squeezed in, and her limbs felt numb.

Dear God. Dear God.

Slow, deep breath. Hammering in her head. Wetness along her neck.

You won’t get anywhere if you panic.

This crawlspace. This...casket.

Blurred images came to her: the white room, the feeling of being laid gently down on some bed, twine wrapped around his hands as he reached for her...

Your hands. Move. Reach.

Her hands were bound in front of her. Thick twine connected her wrists, and as she tugged as hard as she could – barely able to move – she remembered how he’d spoken gently to her. She had been drugged, after all. He had incapacitated her in some way she didn’t understand.

Blocked. No matter how hard she tried to roam with her mind, something blocked her.

Her lips, parched. She opened them, but only a ragged whisper of a sigh came out. Help me. Please. She wanted to say. No, there must be a way out. Must be. This may be a test. It may be another test. It may not be what it seems. It’s just a test. Surely. Please dear God.

Please, she tried to say. Someone.

Then, she heard the voice, barely a whisper. He must be pressing his face near the sealed lid of the box. “Don’t be afraid, Gina. Don’t be afraid. Just let it happen.”

His words had the opposite effect on her. She felt as if she had begun hyperventilating. She fought back tears.

And then she felt the heaviness of her breathing – it hurt her lungs. She tried to take in too much air, and there wasn’t enough.

Please, somebody, help me.

A sound above her. Just above her face.

On the other side of the box.

And then, she gasped, because the air was running out too fast.

2

Miles from the city, in the wilds of northern New Jersey, out along the lakes beneath the great and small houses rising up among dense woods, Spring has only just awakened. The ice only just melted weeks before, the new grass exploding with bright green, with the lavender and yellow of crocus and wildflowers.

Someone’s hunting.

3

A man stood on an empty plateau in a brief, but undisturbed wilderness, overlooking a placid silver lake.

It was a day of winds, a good sign as far as he was concerned. He carried his burden through the tall grass that twisted as the breeze whiffled through it. His boots went into the mud deep, and he pressed slowly through the swampy land until he’d reached the slightly rise of the bank.

He set the man down, relieved to be free of the heaviness.

The man looked up at him, drowsily.

He felt the push of wind at his back; he knelt down beside the man; reached into his breast pocket for the blade; and set about his grim task.

The man beneath him. Eyes open. Watching.

He matched his victim, breath for breath.

The killer caught his breath as he brought the small blade down with the precision of a surgeon.

He closed his eyes and went inside the mind of his victim, just as surely as his knife went into the man's sternum:

The sweetness of the air. Electrical impulses sparking. The smell of ozone -- a whiff of ecstasy, and then, gone, thrown into the other.

Penetrating.

He broke through the barrier.

The blade went into his chest. He looked down at it; his vision went to pinpricks of darkness, and his victim could barely see the face of the one who had stabbed him.

He experienced what his victim felt.

Burning pain. Along his neck and the back of his head. But not in his chest area. Instead, that was a dull throbbing ache. Then, another went in -- stabbing close to his heart -- he lost his vision entirely. Weakness flooded him. The pain was located in his head -- a screaming. But he had already begun to disconnect from it, as if a cord had been snapped from its power source, and he had pulled back into the source itself. But still, he had a linger connection to his body. He felt, but the feelings did not concern him.

A feeling of numbness was followed by the dead stop of the heart. Yet, he had the curious sensation of still being aware.

Not precisely lucid, but aware.

He felt as if his breath contained his essence, and it coughed into a darkness -- he moved, propelled, through some dark void. All the while, he was aware of the others, there, around his body, as if his memory still held them, and the place, the last moments of his life -- held them in perfect balance with this new feeling.

It wasn't a sense of being a physical body, but of being a solid form, undefined by material barriers, but kept in place, an entity.

He moved through the darkness, half expecting to open his eyes. Any anger or resentment he'd felt had run its course just as his blood had trickled from his body. He was on a new voyage now, and knew that the thread was slender, holding him between his last breaths and the doorway through Death.

Then, he felt a shift -- as if something weren't working right. He kept waiting to be brought back into life, but instead, he felt a general weakness, as if his mind were growing tired.

A steep descent. Falling. Smells came up, almonds and peaches, wonderful odors that he hadn’t experienced in years – since childhood – of jasmine and fresh, running river water, orange blossom and even a sharp vinegar bite of a stink. His senses felt as if they were releasing memories, of tastes and scents, all exploding as he fell.

Fear came, as well.

Fear that leaked into madness, and he tried to cling to his memory, and tried to shout himself back to consciousness.

The killer kept the knife in his victim's chest, and his eyes closed, experiencing everything with his victim, feeling the descent into death, trying to stay with his victim so that there was no fear of what was to come.





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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.”

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Alice lit her cigarette, staring straight ahead at the television set. "If we don't hear anything, the boy dies today. They must've gotten the note by now. I don't like this waiting game."

"I was sitting there having a smoke in that room. Barely in that room. He didn't even open his mouth," Stephen said. "How could he?"

She glanced at Stephen, who stood with his back to her, watching the window. Even though the window looked upon the wall of another tenement, he watched as if waiting to see something emerge from the slim crawl space between the buildings.

"I mean, the tape held. But I stood there and had a dream. Like I blacked out standing up. I saw things ..." Stephen wore his black leather jacket and khakis, practically advertising, in Alice's opinion, that something was not quite right in the neighborhood whenever he stepped outside. "He's evil" Stephen said.

"Stephen." Alice shook her head slowly. "You mustn't go down there. It's better to stay away except when he needs food or water."

"Tell that to Charlie. He's down there more than me. Ask him about the boy" Stephen said. He turned around to meet her gaze, leaning back against the sill. "Charlie is getting too chummy with him. It'll make it that much harder when the time comes. When Lena comes back from the store, someone should talk to her, too."

"She's been gone too long. You don't think she'd betray us, do you?" Alice sucked in the smoke and held it. She closed her eyes. Reached up, rubbing the throbbing along her forehead. Exhaled the ribbon of smoke into the pale blue room.

Stephen shrugged. "Anything's possible with her. She's not one of us. I don't like her."

"She's fine" Alice said to reassure herself. "She's probably just looking for those shoes you wanted."

"They're just a pair of tennis shoes" he said, and she noticed the strain of the night showing in his voice and in the stiffness of his movements.

Trying to comfort him, Alice said, "If we don't get a moment with the parents in the next two hours, it's over. A loss. It won't be hard, Charlie enjoys the kill. I'm sick of thinking about that brat."

"The duct tape held. But! heard him"

Alice stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray beside her chair. Then she wheeled her chair over nearer Stephen and tugged at his arm. "Baby, don't let him get to you."

He took her fingers in his. She could smell his cologne now—the Golden Touch, much advertised in magazines, and it reminded her of the citrus groves she'd grown up among. She leaned forward slightly, pressing her cheek against his hand, feeling the coldness of his ring. "He's only twelve, and that whole contest of wills that Charlie had with him—well, boys are like that. I raised a boy once," she said, smiling wistfully.

"Two very wonderful boys," Stephen said.

Alice nodded, turning her face into his leather sleeve, feeling its warmth. "Boys are wily creatures," and when she said this, they both laughed at how silly it sounded.

Their silence afterward was punctuated with the mindless noise of the television,

Then Stephen said, "There's something wrong with him. I could feel it when I was down there. I stood there dreaming something with my eyes open. There's something wrong—he's not okay."

"It doesn't matter," Alice said, pushing her wheelchair away from him. She went over to the small kitchenette and opened one of the lower cabinets. "He could have measles, and it won't matter. He'll be out of his misery soon enough."

"No" Stephen said. "I don't mean he's sick. I mean, there's something about him that isn't normal. He ... changes ... somehow."

Alice had become an expert at ignoring his flights of dark foreboding. They'd all been up too long, unable to sleep. "I feel like cooking eggs. Scrambled eggs. And coffee. None of us has eaten all night. It's nearly midnight. A good plate of eggs will help."

"Very suburban hausfrau of you," Charlie said as he entered the room, wearing his slick raincoat, taking his hat off and dropping it on the chair by the door. His grin was infectious, and it made Alice feel better just to see him. "I called twice. No answer. No word yet from the parents."

"None?" Stephen asked. Then, as if he could not utter his next thought coherently, he coughed.

Charlie glanced around from the two beds to the living-room chairs, to the open bathroom door. "No Lana yet?"

Stephen shook his head. "She's supposed to be buying me shoes and some groceries for us."

"What's open at this hour?" Charlie asked.

Alice laughed. "You boys! I can name four all-night stores within six blocks. Don't worry about Lana. She has too much at stake here."

"Yeah, sure." Charlie grinned, his cheeks rosy. "Helluva night out there. First rain, then no rain, then rain, then no rain. I wish God would make up His mind."

Charlie looked from Stephen to Alice, as if he'd walked in two seconds late, on a wonderful joke. "Everything kosher here? You two look like you've been dissecting my sex life again."

Stephen wagged his hand like a vaudevillian shaking a straw hat. "That's showbiz, folks."

Alice brought out the large frying pan and set it on the stovetop. "I know everyone's starved. I know I am."

She didn't want to look at Stephen again, because he was beginning to look haunted. Finally, as she dropped a pat of butter in the pan, she could not control herself. "Stephen, if you're going to go crazy with this, then it's better you just put yourself out of it for the time being. I want you here, but I don't if you can't handle—"

"Shut up," Stephen snapped. "It's a boy. A real boy. Flesh and blood. Not a middle-aged banker who deserves to die for aiding the global corporate murder of the individual. It's a little boy."

Then, more quietly, he added, "And there's something not right about him. And about this whole thing. What about his parents? It's been forty-eight hours."

"Fifty," Charlie chimed in. "And Stevie's right. The kid is a weirdo. I think he likes being handcuffed." He took off his raincoat, hanging it across the small bed.

Alice said, "Please, Charlie. The closet."

Charlie nodded and gathered the coat up. He opened the closet door, tossing the raincoat onto the rest of the heap of clothes.

"Two days," Stephen said. "A twelve-year-old boy from the North Shore. No history of drug use, no history of running away. A happy, healthy boy."

"He got a C minus in math last year," Charlie added. "He collects stamps and has an aquarium full of tropical fish. His little girlfriend is named Emmy. His father is a friggin' multigazillionaire."

"Really, Charlie," Mice said, shaking her head. She cracked five eggs into the pan and began stirring them with a wooden ladle. "He's a tool. Remember that, Stephen. He is our tool for changing the world. One person at a time."

Stephen shook his head. "It's weird."

Alice sighed, turning around, nearly dropping the last egg she held in her hand. "This is an unusual line of work. Unusual things happen."

"Remember that woman last year?"

Charlie glanced at Alice. Mice knew: it was starting up again with Stephen. Dear Stephen, whom she loved more than any man in the world.

"She said something before we buried her, do you remember?"

Charlie grinned as if Stephen were barmy. "I'm afraid I don't, sport."

"She said, `I won't be the last for you, will I?' And I thought she was lying. But she wasn't, was she? There's always someone else, isn't there? First the banker, then the wife of the corporate thief, and now this little boy. Christ. A little boy. That woman was smart. I thought she was just saying that to play with my conscience. To buy herself four hours of breathing."

"Ha! I'll bet her conscience didn't bother her when she passed the homeless in the street and then got into her limousine," Charlie said. "And where was her conscience when she married that monster husband who raped environments and economies?"

In a sudden move, Stephen picked up a knife from the block on the kitchen Counter. Jokingly, he raised it to Charlie and hacked the air in front of him. Charlie laughed, but Stephen's face tightened and shone with sweat. "Now," he muttered. He stomped toward the door.

"Stephen!" Alice shouted. "Not now. Stop."

Stephen held the knife up as if it were some alien instrument he didn't understand. He looked at it, then turned and looked at Alice. "He told me things that a boy couldn't know. Couldn't possibly know."

"How, Stephen?" Alice asked, letting the eggs burn on the stove, turning her wheelchair around. "How? His mouth is covered with tape. His hands are bound behind his back. How did he tell you?"

Charlie shook his head, and went and sat in front of the television set. "Stephen, Stephen, Stephen."

Stephen clutched the knife, then dropped it. It clattered on the parquet floor. "I should cut his throat. The piglet. But he ... changes. He's not the same boy we took on Wednesday...."

"Oh, baby," Alice said, bringing her chair over. She reached her hands up for Stephen's and held him. He collapsed to his knees in front of her, pressing his face into her lap. She stroked his soft curly hair. "Stephen, poor baby. This is too hard for you, isn't it?"

"Something about him ... the way he stares ..." Stephen whispered.

"It's all right," she said. "Don't worry."

From his chair Charlie said, "Christ, it's on the news, finally."

Stephen lifted his head, tears in his eyes. Alice pulled her chair back, pivoting it around and wheeling over toward the television.

A reporter stood in front of the house on Grimaldi Street.

"Turn it up," Alice said. "I can barely hear it."

The reporter said, "The discovery of the bodies of John and Paulette Early at six o'clock this evening shocked this upscale neighborhood ..."

Charlie laughed. "This must be a scam! We didn't kill them. Christ, they weren't even awake."

Alice glanced at Stephen. Something in his eyes had changed—as if he'd woken from a dream but had not quite come out of it completely.

"They must be trying to flush us out with this, that's all," Charlie said, shaking his head. "Those feds. Christ. I mean, why would we kill the man who we want to pay us ten million dollars?"

The reporter continued, "There is still no sign of their daughter, Rosanna, eleven ..."

A photograph of a little girl flashed on the screen. Golden hair past her shoulders, a ribbon tied about it, her eyes like an owl's eyes, not pretty exactly, but certainly pleasing to look at.

Alice turned to Stephen. "A little girl?"

Stephen grinned, a little too madly, she thought, a little too edgy. "Yes, mother. That's what the man said. And you know what? I believe him. The kid told me he's been everything, he's been girls and women and men and dogs and even flies. Even flies!"

Stephen fell silent for a moment, as if he'd opened some dam within him and had to shut it down so as not to let everything out.

Then he said, "He told me he likes the way life tastes."

Smoke billowed into the room, and Alice realized it was the eggs burning on the stove. She wheeled over and picked the pan up, dropping it into the sink. She turned on the water, and steam spat up.

"He told me," Stephen said. "He wanted us to take him because he wants to taste us, too. He made me see some things. Some awful things."

Was he weeping? Alice couldn't see his eyes, because he'd turned away from her. His shoulder shuddered.

"What could he possibly make you see?" she asked. "Stephen?"

"Where he came from. Those people in that mansion—they aren't his parents," Stephen began. "He's not even a boy, is he? He's a nightmare. He's a ..."

And then Stephen told what the boy had shown him, and told it perfectly as the boy had burned it into his mind, as if it had really happened, as if Stephen had been opened up by what the boy had done to him....

The first story of the night began.

His biggest mistake had been picking up the hitchhiker in the rain.

Of course, this one was a bit different, which may be why he had let down his guard.

She was a pretty girl, from what he could see of her. She had a face that he would call heart-shaped, and maybe she had small eyes, but something about her whole demeanor gave off vibes. The needy kind, but not the clingy kind; that's what he would've said. She needed help. She was in need—that much was apparent. She needed him, and that made her prettier to him, in a way. It was his weakness—pretty girls. Pretty young women. Lost. Needy. She was like a breath of young love—that's what he thought, although it was the part of him that he kept buried most times.

She was young love, this girl, in need of a ride home.

Mark Carpenter felt bad for her. He'd been to visit his father in Kingston and had only come back in the middle of the night, in a storm no less, because he could not stand to sleep in the same house with that man and decided that enough was enough. He had not been in a good mood since leaving his father's house. After crossing over the bridge to the east side of the river, he'd taken an old familiar route back to his home in Watch Point. It had been nearly midnight when he'd somehow gotten lost—he blamed the storm and all the roiling thoughts about his father and some sense of failure he'd always had as a son—but then found his way back by way of the old route (they even called it the Old Road).

He was nearly in town again when the hitchhiker ran into the road. Or was standing there. He couldn't remember, later.

All right, for just a second, he could admit, he thought of something more than just helping someone. She was pretty. Maybe even sexy. Some part of his brain ran a fantasy, but he shut it down fast when he guessed her age. She was a bit young, although, in the rain, and from a distance, she had looked older. She had, he told himself, looked nineteen when he first saw her. In the headlights.

She was no more than sixteen. Maybe fourteen. It was hard to tell with girls these days, he'd say later. The way they grew up fast. Her mascara ran down her face, and the top of her blouse was ripped back.

She held the flap of torn garment up, for modesty.

Something bad had happened. He was sure.

On these muddy roads, this time of night—in a nearly freezing gale of a storm—she seemed to be a silver tear on the windshield as he pulled his Toyota Camry to the shoulder of the road.

The trees whipped the air in a frenzy. He hesitated getting out of the car.

She ran over to the passenger side, her form a blur in the downpour. He leaned over and unlocked the door for her.

The first thing he said to her when she slid in beside him was, "Not a fit night for man nor beast," in his best W. C. Fields. He wondered if he'd said it wrong, because it didn't sound funny or reassuring at all.

She was in tatters, from her stringy hair to the clothes on her back, but he tried not to look at her too much. He didn't want her to feel threatened by him. She seemed so scared already.

"You all right?" he asked. Rain beat down hard on the windshield. A field of some sort lay beyond the trees—he saw it in flashes of lightning.

"Something's after me," she said, desperation in her voice.

"Someone hurt you?" Still, he didn't feel comfortable looking directly at her.

All right, he could admit it to himself: He didn't want to be thought of as one of those men who pick up girls on the road. It didn't seem right. He had never picked up a hitchhiker before, but she had been standing there in the road, essentially in the middle of nowhere, close enough to the nearby town but far enough away—particularly in the storm—at it seemed wrong to leave her.

He didn't like the whole situation, and considering that his wife already suspected that he chased women, this wouldn't look good. Not that his wife would find out. He just didn't need to make this known.

"Where you going?"

"Anywhere. Just drive," she said. Her voice was ragged, like her blouse. He noticed—out of the corner of his eye—that there were smudges on her face. Dirt?

"Who hurt you?"

"No one. No one hurt me. Just drive. Please."

"All right. All right," he said. He pressed his foot on the accelerator, driving back onto the road.

"Can I tell you something?" she asked, that desperation strong in her voice. That need. "Can I trust you?"

It reminded him a bit of his daughter, this girl, and it bothered him that she might be in some unfortunate circumstance. Had someone hurt her? Had someone bothered her? He tried to push other, darker thoughts out of his head. "Yeah. Sure," he said.

"I mean, something really important. Something that hurts to tell."

"Yeah. Yes."

"The rain's nearly stopping."

"Is it?" he said, and wished he'd remained silent. Without realizing it, he'd slowed down.

"Keep driving. Please."

His hands tensed on the steering wheel. "You live in the village?"

"If I tell you this, you have to promise. Promise not to tell. Anyone."

"I'm Mark, by the way."

"Promise me you can keep this secret."

"All right," he said. He thought she was nuts, but there was such an ache in her voice that he believed her. He was a trusting sort. But he believed her, and knew that something was wrong. Something bad had happened to this child, and he wanted to help her.

"Do you know the house outside town?"

"Which one?"

"The one that used to be a school."

"Oh. Of course. The fire. Those kids."

"I had a bet with my friends, and we went out to stay in it. Just for one night. Last night."

"That's dangerous. It's condemned."

"Are you going to listen?"

"Sorry."

"We went to stay in it. Three of us. We drank a little, and I was there with Nick. My boyfriend." She began whimpering like a puppy; she was sobbing. He glanced over at her, but the car slid in the road, and he had to return his gaze to the front.

The windshield wipers slashed at the rain.

"We stayed up late and wandered around. It was half ruins, but there's plenty still there. There's room after room. And everything was okay. Everything was okay."

"Did someone hurt you?" he blurted.

She ignored him. "Everything was okay. And then, sometime at night, I started feeling cold. Not just cold, but really cold. Like something was touching me with ice. I looked over for Nick, but he wasn't there. We had candles everywhere, and Joey—he was the other one who came along—was sitting in a corner of the room, shivering. When I asked him where Nick was, he said nothing. I felt ice all over my neck and down my back, and I got up. I nearly knocked a candle over, but I caught it in time. I was all wrapped up in a blanket. Joey kept shivering and wouldn't say anything. It was like he was somewhere else. And then I went looking for Nick, and I went out into the moonlight. This was last night. It was a full moon. A clear night. Nick was standing there, looking up at the moon, only he wouldn't look at me when I called to him. I kept saying, `Nick, Nicky, why'd you go?' but he wouldn't look at me. And then I touched him, only I couldn't. Something was wrong. It was like my hand went through him."

Mark smirked. "Like he was a ghost," he said, and then wished he hadn't.

"But this is the secret," she said, not missing a beat. "This is the secret."

"All right, all right, calm down. I'm listening."

He remembered it later—the hesitation. The beating of the rain, and the rhythm of the windshield wipers. The lightning that lit up the road, briefly.

Finally, she whispered, "I am the ghost."

Mike pressed his foot on the brakes. Enough of this tomfoolery. This was some kind of prank, some kind of Spring Break joke. "All right, all right," he said.

But he was alone in the Toyota Camry.

When he told the police in Watch Point about it, the first cop he spoke with laughed, and the second said, "That's Nicky Verona, he and Joey Willis. Bad kids. Really bad kids." He wanted to add: but only bad in the small-time way, the shoplifting, the lies, the loitering, the drinking-outside-the-convenience-stores kind of bad. The bad kids of a village the size of Watch Point.

Ne'er-do-wells.

It probably would've ended there, but the second cop, named Elliot Brooks, decided to call the Verona household to see if Nicky was around. He was not. Had not been back since the night before. This wasn't unusual, Mrs. Verona said. Nicky was wild. Then Brooks called the Willises. He found out that Nicky and Joey went off on some camping trip for their first weekend of Spring Break.

Brooks decided to check out Harrow, the property on the edge of town, the site of a terrible fire the previous year, a fire that had destroyed some of the property. A tragedy on the grounds had closed down the school that had operated there for decades.

The body of the girl was found, in a small room with a leaky roof, surrounded by snuffed candles. Joey Willis still shivered in the corner, staring at the body, but Nicky Verona had already taken off for points unknown.

The girl, identified as a local teenager named Quincy Allen, a resident of nearby Hyde Park, had been missing for several days from her family's home (supposedly at a week-long get-together at a friend's in Albany). Strangely enough, she'd had a heart attack, and someone on the scene noted that given her eyes and the position of her hands, it appeared as if she'd been frightened to death, if this were at all possible.

The only thing Joey Willis had said that made any sense to the local police was: "I told Nicky it was wrong to do it. I told him it was crazy to do it. But it wasn't him, was it? It was that place. They surrounded us. They made it happen."

Mark Carpenter, who had picked up the hitchhiker, still did not believe any of this ghost business. He began drinking at night, and told his wife that he could not have imagined all of it. "She was there! I saw her. She sat next to me!"

2

This was the tale that Ivy Martin heard at a party in Manhattan, when someone knew that she had a connection to the house.

3

Those words, "She was there! I saw her. She sat next to me!" were the punch line to this story that made its rounds among people who had an interest in such legends. Ivy could practically still smell the annoying cigar smoke of the teller of the tale, and the awful scent of overly ginned breath. It was Fleetwood who stood by, looking—to Ivy, anyway—like Mr. Death with blue eyes and dark hair, waiting to grab another soul. She shot him a glance, then—you brought me here to hear this story, didn't you? And Fleetwood had smiled, nodding, as if he could read her mind. Which he could not, she was sure, because a few choice words were included in her thoughts at the moment as well, and none of them complimentary toward Jack Fleetwood.

Jack had been annoying her with stories of Harrow ever since they'd met, ever since she'd mentioned her interest in psychic phenomena and her connection to the place itself.

He had told her first about what he thought of Harrow, and the phrases that lingered with her were murderous intent, diseased land, haunting ground, and spirit portal.

It was just before Easter, and her friend Jack Fleetwood was having his gathering, which he called Spring Fever, at his brownstone, with the strange people Jack often attracted in his role running PSI Vista Foundation, which Ivy had become more involved with over the past few months. The storyteller was drunk when he told the tale, and he wasn't specifically telling it to Ivy, but once she heard the name of the house, she wanted to hear the entire story. She could pull this moment out later—something that Fleetwood would term synchronicity—but which she considered serendipity more than anything. She was at a Foundation where stories of ghosts and the paranormal were the norm. She had used the Foundation's library to get hold of a copy of a book from the early twentieth century called The Infinite Ones by Isis Claviger, a moderately successful medium of the time. Claviger had written about a house in the Hudson Valley, which, as it turned out, was the house in the story that the drunken man in the tweedy jacket spilled across the guests near him. Then Fleetwood had asked her questions about the house, and she had come to his party.

It felt arranged, but Ivy had begun to accept this kind of thing. The invisible thread, she thought of it—it connected people of like minds. It was always there, and she had found herself caught up in it in the recent past as well.

An unbroken chain, that's what it was, Ivy told herself. It was what tied her to Stephen.

Stephen Hook had been the young man she'd loved, several years previously, and he was dead, but he, too, had a connection to this house.

Don't think of his face, don't bring him back in memory, please don't; she often lay in bed at night thinking these things. But her memories of him always returned, and more often than not she woke in the morning, her face still wet from tears cried in the night.

Stephen and Harrow. Jim and Harrow. Jim was Stephen's younger brother, and he, too, was dead. Mr. Death was everywhere. Everywhere that I go, she thought. And it's all about that place.

The house was called Harrow, and Ivy had already been thinking of the property long before she'd heard the story of the hitchhiker and of this man named Mark Carpenter. She knew that some kind of legend would spring from the house again. She knew that a place like that could not contain its mystery for very long—unless she was mistaken about it.

Unless it was not the place she believed it to be (for she had read the history of it, brought to her attention by Fleetwood and his Foundation, brought to her attention because of her connection to the house. Harrow was a name she wished she had never heard. Harrow would somehow be her undoing, she was certain. And yet, she could not stop thinking about it).

What this someone-at-the-party didn't know was that she had been dreaming of the house since October of the previous year.

Ivy Martin was a tall drink of water—as her father used to say, much to her annoyance—at five feet nine inches, a blonde with a passion for the mysterious and a knack for making coin no matter which way she turned. She felt she resembled a stork or a scrawny pony, but she knew that she was considered fashionable and stylish by Manhattan standards. Her sense of her own unattractiveness had been emphasized in her hometown, where she was more often than not called scrawny and tow-head. It was only as she got older that these became thin and blond. She never knew where her drive had come from—her mother told her that she got it from God or the Devil, but it was a burning desire to not be poor or uneducated or without security. She had read Ayn Rand at fifteen, and had determined that, like the heroes of the novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, she would go on and become her own hero in life even if her mother and father could not be heroes themselves.

She determined that she would become more than she was meant to be; and not being the ice goddess some of her boyfriends had claimed in her youth, she did what she could to temper this ambition with compassion and an understanding of how the heart needed tending as much as the fire she felt within. She excelled at academics but was mostly uninvolved in the more social activities of school—she worked baby-sitting until she was sixteen, at which point she began an unglamorous job at KMart that helped pay bills her father seemed unwilling to pay. Even with her minimum-wage income, she scraped together some savings and began investing in the stock market just based on an intuition. She had been raised poor, and had a small talent early on for business and finances; by the time she'd reached eighteen, graduating in the number-two slot in her high school class, she had already begun investing in the stock market and, more by accident than design, had happened to buy a little stock called Microsoft, a then-little-known company, before she turned nineteen—and within a few years the shares she bought had leaped and split and grown into a small fortune.

If stocks and investments were her area of luck, love had not been. After her parents' deaths, the only man she had ever loved had died—and even so, she had felt her love for him was wrong. They had been too young—but she had been the older of the two and should've known better. And then her unborn child had died, within her body, the same night. Other deaths seemed to surround her to the point that she thought it best not to involve anyone too intimately in her life. She had set that part of her life aside to run some small businesses and follow her sense of the seriousness of life. Her money grew further, and she had more than she figured she would ever need. Now, nearly thirty years old, she felt the jigsaw puzzle mystery of her own existence might be coming together; and certainly the story of the hitchhiking ghost girl was one of the pieces.

It was one of those stories that seemed almost an urban legend, although, in this case, it was very much a suburban legend: a friend of my sister knows this guy named Mark Carpenter, and he was from this town called Watch Point in the Hudson Valley, and one night, in the rain, he was driving down a lonesome road when he saw a hitchhiker in the middle of the road. She heard the story at one party, and then someone called her and told her about some ghost story in the Hudson Valley; and she knew that somehow fate was pointing her this way. When a third person told the story of the hitchhiker and Harrow, she knew she could no longer ignore it.

It always ended with Mark Carpenter's verbal eruption of the truth of the story.

That "Mark Carpenter" chose to drive a Toyota Camry could add to the factual way the legend would sound: it was a specific car, and the driver had a name: Mark Carpenter. Even the girl: Quincy Allen. Quincy was an unusual name (although, Ivy knew, no more unusual than "Ivy"), but for the small villages and burgs along the Hudson Valley, up beyond Cold Spring, it wasn't that out of place. It sounded right.

Ivy had then called the police department at Watch Point and, indeed, there was an Officer Elliot Brooks. He seemed a young man with a deep, sonorous voice, who told her that he did not wish to discuss the death of Quincy Allen. So Ivy knew that the legend had some truth. She knew that it connected to Harrow. She researched it further and, after making some inquiries, discovered that Harrow could be had for a fairly modest price, in the condition it was in—less than half a million, although who ever bought it had to commit to renovating and repairing it within a year's time.

4

One night she had a dream, and all she could remember from it was a white bird and the word Mercy; a giant spear of some kind—a three-pronged spear—covered in blood swept the air; and a voice that whispered, "Your flesh is my release," and then she saw him. But before she saw him, her eyes had begun filling with tears, as if she knew he was going to be there.

Stephen.

As if he had never died. Beautiful, young, in love with her, and fighting everything within himself to keep from touching her in the dream. His sandy brown hair was swept across his forehead, and his nose was wrinkled slightly, the way it used to when he laughed too much, and he had that grin. It could win her over in an instant. He was alive, and there with her, and he wanted to hold her—she could see it in his intense gaze—and she ached to be held by him.

She woke up, sweat soaking into the white sheets, her skin tingling like pinpricks along her spine.

She knew what to do.

She had been dreaming of Harrow for several months, ever since she'd seen the news about the fire at the school. Ever since she'd had the connection to it that she wished she could shake.

The rest fell into place. She made the calls. She argued with people. She checked with her financial planner. She decided to sell some stock.

She went on a trip up to Harrow.

Like the legend of Mark Carpenter and Quincy Allen, it was another rainy night, but spring was like that in New York.

5

Coincidence abounds.

That was Ivy Martin's first thought when she saw the street called Mercy, and then when she noticed that she wanted to stop in a town called Red Fork to ask directions, and in doing so, found herself sitting down—in the rain—at a small diner called the White Heron. Although there had been no heron in her dream, there had been a white bird, and that was enough. A white bird and even the word Mercy.

She noticed the sign, too, just inside the White Heron Diner, just felt marker on white poster board: FORTUNE SMILES. TIME FLIES. LOVE GROWS. CUSTOMERS TIP.

Coincidence abounds, she thought. How often does this happen, this déjà vu from dream to reality, from the subconscious flow of images in a completely illogical dream to the hard world of life with its benches and diner booths and signs? She didn't know, but she felt this all added up in some significant way.

There had been a sign, too, in the recesses of her memory—the dream within a dream, the writing on the wall that said something about Fortune, only she couldn't quite remember what it was.

“What do you want more than anything else in the world?”

“You know. I already told you.”

“Say it.”

“You can’t bring back the dead.”

“It’s a game,” he said, mostly to himself. “It’s only a game, right? Like a room in my mind. It is a game.”

“If you say so. Believe what you want. No one ever said you couldn’t.”

“It has to be,” he said. “It’s some kind of game. A test. Part of the initiation.”

The wind brushed through his hair as he stood at the open window, looking down.

It was a hell of a long drop. He stood on the ledge at the top of the tower. He imagined dropping a water balloon and counting til ten before it hit the pavement. That’s what it would be like. He’d drop and then it would all be over.

“Every game has its rules. I just need to know what the rules of this one are,” he said, hoping the other boy would tell him something – anything – that would give away this game.

He kept feeling the tug of the earth – not gravity, but the need to be there, the need to leave the tower and return to the ground again. He couldn’t keep from looking down.

The more he looked at the distance between where he stood and the earth below, the more interesting it became. It didn’t seem like a fall, it seemed like he could just step over into it, as if…his eyes were playing tricks on him…but it was as if it wasn’t a long way down at all.

The other boy stood behind him and whispered, “It’s just like a corridor, isn’t it? You look down and see the drive and the stones and the fountain, but it changes when you watch it, the edge of your vision wraps around it, and it becomes a long corridor and it makes you feel as if you could just step out into it, and walk that long way to its end, to find out what waits there for you. You can’t go back because you know what waits for you there. You can’t stay where you are. You must go forward.”

“What’s there?” he asked.

“What you want. More than anything.”

“No,” he said.

“Go on. You’ll see. You can’t stay on the ledge, can you? You can’t go back. You know what’s there. You can only go on. You want to, I can tell.”

“What’s there?” he repeated his previous question.

But the boy behind him didn’t answer. He may have stepped away.

“It has to be a game,” he said. “This can’t be real. This can’t be.”

He stood alone at the top of the tower.

And then, he stepped off the ledge.

Interview with the Demon

1

The teenaged boy spoke into the tape machine:

“Here’s all I know. We did something terrible. It wasn’t us. But we let it in.”

“How did you let it in?”

The boy said:

“If I tell you, you won’t believe me. If I tell you, you’re gonna say we’re insane. I’m not stupid. I know what you think. You think, ‘here’s this 16 year old who probably killed all these people and now he doesn’t want to have to take the blame so of course he blames it on demons.’ But here’s the thing: I was there. You weren’t. I saw them. I saw her..”

“Where?”

“Inside me. I saw her inside me. She’s inside all of us. It’s too late.”

“And where is she now?”

“I don’t know. Maybe sleeping. Maybe she’s waiting. Maybe…”

“Yes?”

“Maybe she wants all of this to be forgotten and then maybe she’ll come back, years from now, maybe she’ll come back because we hurt her, we wounded her in some way, and she doesn’t have as much power. Maybe when she’s all healed, she’ll come back.”

“What did you do to hurt her?”

“Not just me, all of us.”

“How did you hurt her?”

“There are rituals. One of us knew how. Maybe he didn’t know how. Maybe he lied. You gotta understand it was crazy. It was crazy. Everything was burning. Everyone was dying or dead. It was like this little point of – I don’t know – craziness that made total sense. What we did. At the time. It seemed right. It seemed like the only thing. But now it sounds insane. It sounds like something evil. What we did.”

A pause on the tape.

The question was repeated.

“We stopped her,” the boy finally said.

“You stabbed her with this knife that you mentioned? The one that – “

“Sends people to hell. That’s what it was supposed to do. But, no. We didn’t. We should’ve maybe. You weren’t there. It’s crazy. What we did.”

“What did you do?”

“All of us did it. We all did.”

“How can you stop a demon?” the man asked.

2

A girl said into the tape machine:

“I don’t remember what happened. You tell me.”

The man asked, “You mean you don’t remember what happened to your family?”

Silence on the tape for several minutes.

Then, “My grandmother gave me a Bible to read. In it, there are demons, but none seem very real. Do you believe in God?”

“That’s the search of life. But yes, I believe in God. Perhaps not the way some people would think of God, but yes.”

“I guess if you believe in God, you’d believe in demons too, wouldn’t you?”

“Perhaps.”

“I don’t believe in demons. It’s stupid to believe in demons, isn’t it? It’s like fairy tales or dreams. It makes no sense. I think it’s all a lie. I think one of them did it all. I saw him kill my mother. I saw him kill all of them.”

“Where are the bodies?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t remember. I told you.”

Then, after a moment’s pause, she added:

“I do remember one thing.”

“What?”

“I remember a wall. I remember a shadow on the wall. I remember…wings, like bats, in a cave, all around me…and seeing a light so blue that it was like a perfect sky and then I saw what looked like a wolf above me lean down and whisper something dreadful to me.”

“What did the wolf say?”

“My name. That’s all. He called me by name. He knew my name. But it was a dream. It was a nightmare. I’m awake now. It didn’t happen.”

3

A different boy laughed as the tape whirred. “This is a big contraption,” he said.

“I don’t like cassettes.”

“Yeah, I guess they suck. So, I guess Peter probably told you that completely nuts story about demons and stuff, right? Yeah, I knew he would. He’s delusional. There’s no way that happened.”

“Alison told me that you did it.”

A pause.

“Is this for the cops?”

“No, it’s for my own research.”

“Okay. Well, I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me anyway even though I guess my hands did some of it.” He laughed again. “All right, I’ll tell you the truth. It wasn’t demons, it was the Devil, I’m pretty sure, yeah. It was like the Big Bad Guy. Possession and all that – I mean, I’m not Catholic or anything, but I sort of believe in Hell at this point and I sort of believe in Heaven, and maybe I’m as messed up as all these docs say and maybe I really think I saw the Devil or maybe it was like a movie of the Devil or maybe I really did murder a bunch of people, but hell, find their bodies, ok? Find their bodies. That’s what the lawyers said. Find their bodies, and then you can come execute me or whatever they do to kids who kill.”

“What did the Devil look like?”

“See, I can tell you don’t believe in this. That’s cool. Most jerk-offs in this world think there’s no such thing and that it’s all make believe and stuff, but that’s because they never experienced it. They never got touched by it, like we did.”

“I’ve studied cases of demonic possession before.”

“Yeah, like The Exorcist, right? Shit, a kid in a bedroom spitting pea soup’s kind of sweet compared to what we went through.”

“Tell me about the Devil.”

“Ok. Well it’s not just one thing, is it? It’s many. It’s goo dripping out of someone’s brain and that someone still talking to you and maybe it’s got claws and maybe you’re just dreaming standing up – and maybe its crawls across your hands like ants and scorpions and then it just looks like maybe a pretty girl. A pretty girl who knows how to get boys. A pretty girl who has things inside her. Well, there was this girl – wait, she was more like a woman – and she was a demon only not like you think of demons, and she could sort of change things, she could bend things, you know? Like a mirror – like a funhouse mirror -- and she had this thing where once she had you, you were hers and she made all kinds of things happen…” He kept laughing as he spoke, giggling, sniggering. “Like, you know, people would…I can’t even say it, you know I saw all kinds of shit, stuff that you only dream about. It was all in us to begin with. I don’t think she could’ve done what happened without us. I think we were each part of her. But it was all the Devil, you know? It was all this other thing going on, I mean, I got this from the source, I got it from the person who knows. Shit, we’re still part of her. She’s in us. I tried to stop her. Hell, we all did. I even had this knife – this sort of ritual thing. It was called an athame. It could’ve sent her to Hell. I know it could’ve.”

“Are you possessed?”

“I don’t know, but even when I’m talking to you now, I can see her, over there, calling me. But that’s why I’m going into the looney bin, ain’t it?”

“Over here? By the window?”

“Yeah. Right there.”

“Describe her.”

“Well, Christ, she’s really pretty and she – wait…she’s…”

“What’s she saying to you? Right now?”

“If I was to tell you, she’d kill me. And maybe you, too. I can’t tell anyone. It’s something that’s between her and me. Until the end of time.”

4

The last tape played.

“Who are you?”

A sound like rushing wind on the tape.

“I am that I am.”

“Why are you inside him?”

“He has sacrificed to me. He has given his soul to me.”

“What do you mean to do with him?”

“What I mean to do with all of them. All of those I have touched. All of those who have partaken of me.”

And then, something that sounded like a screeching howl, overlaid with another sound, like hundreds of people whispering secrets in an echoing cavern.

When the sound had finally stopped, the man asked: “Are you a demon?”

“I am the enemy of your kind.”

“And your name?”

“Lamia,” and even though the voice was still the boy’s, it sounded like a woman speaking from within him.

“Why are you here?”

“You called me.”

The shattering of glass and metal, as some unseen intruder broke the window, did not wake him.

A voice in his head whispered, "Your soul."

The rain outside, and the wind that blew across the near-desolate room, across the old woman's face as she too lay back in some dream, he knew this but none of it could draw him up from sleep; the crunch and squeal of a door opening, of glass being stepped upon, all of this played at the edge of his consciousness, but he could not tug away from the dream that had grabbed him.

The voice whispered, "Your heart."

His eyelids fluttered open for a moment, and then the boy closed them again, as if the real world were the dream, and his inner world, the truth.

Even the mindpain was only a shredded curtain, blowing against a window of the dream.

The boy dreamed on. His inner eyes opened onto the other world, the one of insane geometries, of orange lightning, of fire that rained from trees like leaves falling, of the birds rising from the water their impossibly pure white wings spreading across the burning sky. As the sky filled with bloody swans, he saw the dark ram with its golden eyes shining as it galloped towards him across the surface of the unbroken water. Then the eels wriggling across the glassy surface, turning the brown water red with their wakes. The ram rode across their backs, its hooves beating like knives on stones. The Azriel Light came up from its breath, forming crystalline in the mist of air, and then burned across the world. What was unspeakable found voice and its bleating froze the air for a moment hacked from the fabric of time as the secret of all stabbed at his ears.

Someone tried to wake him from it. The mindpain came back like a bolt of lightning, burning along his neural pathways. The boy's eyes opened, his dream torn apart.

The man shook him awake and held a hand over his mouth. The room came back with its shadows of curtains and half-opened cupboards. The trill of a mockingbird outside the window. The shroud of dawn. The room that always seemed too small for all of them. The others slept on around him.

The man wore a dark leather jacket and jeans, his dark hair in need of a cut, and the smell from him was almost sweet -- like sage on the desert after a rain.

"You Satan?" the boy asked in a hushed tone of reverence. Fear was not there. He didn't sense it. He didn't feel it from the man, and it wasn't within him. He knew, somehow, the man would be there. He knew just as he knew that his dream had foretold something.

"I could be," the man whispered, his breath all cigarettes, "If you keep quiet, you'll live. Understand?"

The boy nodded. The mindpain blossomed against his small skull. When it came on, as it usually did after one of the Great Meetings, it would blast within his head like the worst headache. Sometimes his nose would bleed from it. Sometimes he'd go into convulsions. He never knew how hard it would hit, he just knew it was PAIN. He knew it HURT. The mindpain didn't let go until it was good and ready to.

The boy felt something pressed against his side.

Cold metal.

"That's right," the man whispered. "It's a gun. I will kill you if you make a noise or try to fight me. Or if you try to do what I know you can do."

The boy began shivering, and wasn't sure if he could will himself to stop. He wanted to be back in his dream. It felt like ants were crawling all over his arms and legs. Ants stinging him all over, and then tickling along his neck. He wanted to swat and scratch, but he was afraid the man might use the gun. The boy had seen a jack rabbit get shot clean in half once. He didn't need to imagine it happening to himself.

But the markings on him, the drawings...

He knew they were moving, the pictures on his shoulders. He wished he could scrape them from his flesh. He wanted to tell the stranger with the gun about them, about how they meant bad things when they began moving, but the boy knew this would do no good.

The man grinned as he lifted the boy up, wrapping a shabby blanket around him. The boy's last view of what he had come to call home was the old woman lying there staring at him. Blood sluiced from between her lips, and tears bled down in rivulets from her eyes. The mattress beneath her was soaked red. Her fingers were still curled around a small amulet she kept with her, nothing more than a locket, a good luck charm.

The boy was too tired to fight, and weakened, too, by the previous day's performance. Mindpain always came after the show. Mindpain was like what the Great Father had called a hangover. It was the morning after. That was a problem for him, it sapped him of strength, and even when he had tried to kick out at the man, he could barely move his legs.

The man would probably kill him. The boy knew this is what kidnappers usually did. He had watched late night TV shows like "America's Most Wanted" and knew that kidnappers rarely kept a kid alive.

The boy tried not to think of the gun.

Tried to remember the Great Father holding his arms out, his hands open to him. "I will be your comfort in the valley of the shadow," the Great Father had said.

This was the valley of the shadow of death. This kidnapper and his gun and his blanket and the red stain on the mattress with the old woman's mouth wide open.

Thinking about it, the boy winced. The hammering in his head grew stronger. Everything hurt.

The pounding of the rain on the roof seemed unbearable. It was a terrible rain, it had come at first as ice and then tiny pebbles hitting the corrugated tin roof, until finally, it was just water. God is pissin' on us on accounta our sins, that's what the old woman who took care of him would say, her Texas twang increasing with her years. She was dead now. She was in whatever Great Beyond existed, the boy knew. She was in the pictures that covered him now, as were all things that were no more. If the mindpain hadn't descended that night, weakening him further, he might've been able to struggle against this evil man who took him. Even though the blanket covered the boy's ears, it was as if the hoofbeats of wild horses were beating down upon him from heaven.

The kidnapper threw him into the backseat of a car. Slammed the door. As they drove off, the boy glanced back at the place he'd called home and knew in his heart he would never see it again. Dawn was just bursting from the far horizon. Rain accompanied it, the first fresh drops hitting the car windows, dirt rinsing down. The pain in the boy's head grew, and he could feel the tingling begin along his back and shoulders. He knew that whatever was supposed to start, all the things that he'd been warned about by the Great Father, would come to pass now.

Through him, the radiance would come, like electricity through the idiot wires of the gods.

His skin felt molten.

He was on the boat when it happened.

A gun firing in the dark morning...

He felt a cold sweat break out along his back and neck. Not from the heat, but from what seemed, momentarily, like a primal fear of creation itself: the sea, the rocks, the endless sky. He knew it was irrational, perhaps even a sign of a panic attack. A second later, the world was normal again. Fear was gone. The gun which had accidentally gone off in his remembered dream was silent.

A white flash in a dark room...

Later, he'd remember that sense, as if he'd heard a warning shot, but at that moment he was more concerned with his fishing line. He had developed that capacity over the years, to forget painful memory and to attend to what was directly in front of him.

During the three hours out to sea, all that he could possibly fear would come to pass, but from a distance.

For now, he could relax and try to enjoy the sea, the air, the boat.

The boat was a Bayrunner Westcoaster, a fourteen-footer, welded marine metal, made for rough weather, but not designed to traverse the twenty-six some miles between San Pedro, on the mainland, and Catalina Island. It was for harbor fishing, the man who rented the boats told him. It would be at anyone's risk to take it out further than two miles from the island.

He and his wife were barely out a mile in the boat. He wished he could take it out further, not just for the fishing, but for the peace and calm. The boat was rented for the week, and came with the requisite nicks and dents and a kind of pallor to the metal. The outboard motor was a two-cylinder with thirty-five horsepower, which he'd had a hard time starting. He had killed the motor an hour before, and cast his line down.

His wife, Carly, didn't enjoy fishing but loved being out at sea. She set her paperback down for a moment and scanned the island, as if she'd left something behind there and perhaps wanted to go back for it.

"Water's too warm," he said. "All the squid probably moved on to colder currents, and all the yellowtail followed, maybe even the white sea bass, too. I'll be damned lucky if I catch a halibut."

"Poor baby," Carly said, "We can have yellowtail up at the café without having to put a hook in some fish-mouth." She grinned. She found fishing boring, but the sea, soothing.

"Ah," he said. "But it's so much better when the fish has a fighting chance. Makes me feel manly to catch it. Makes me feel like Hemingway."

"I didn't know Mariel Hemingway fished," his wife said, flicking water at him. She giggled, "Oh, Trey, so serious with your fishing. You must feel like I'm just keeping you chained to my side, just when you're dreaming of freedom on the open waves." She crossed her arms behind her head for support, and closed her eyes against the sun. "How awful to have a wife like me. Well, it's only a few years to your mid-life crisis. Then you can chase blondes, drive little red Miatas, and comb your hair over whatever bald spot's going to emerge between now and fifty."

He shook his head, grinning. "Chained and happy. Just wish I could go back...stop things before they happened..." He couldn't look at his wife, then.

"Stop it," Carly said, tenderly. She sat up again, returning her attention to her paperback.

"Romance?" he asked.

"Hardly. It's the story of a guy who goes with his wife on vacation and manages to make the whole trip as stressful as possible until the wife has no choice but to run off with the cabana boy."

The sea was a sheet of brilliant cobalt, the sky was bone white, the boat was gently rocking. He did most of his fishing near the rocks, just beyond the breakwater. Carly had insisted on bringing a cooler full of sodas, and he knew that it would be a problem later. He watched her, now, as she drank a Pepsi, her hair dark and shiny beneath his old San Diego Padres baseball cap, which was to keep the sun off her face -- at thirty, she was becoming slightly worried about having spent her entire life at the beach down in San Diego, worried less out of vanity, more out of fear of the skin cancer that had weakened her father before his death.

But she was so far away from death -- that's what he thought then. She still looked as she had at twenty, as far as he was concerned, although she claimed she was getting fat. Actually, truth be known, he was putting on a bit of a paunch which he was trying to fend off with an exercise routine, because he just couldn't give up the twice-weekly trips to Baskin-Robbins for banana splits. He was just thirty-six, jogged four miles three times a week, and swam a mile or two at the local gym whenever he thought of it. He had been an unathletic child, but for some reason, in his late twenties, had begun a regimen which allowed him a few beers and some ice cream. One thing he couldn't stand to do were sit-ups, or what were now called "crunches," and, thus, the paunch.

These were his thoughts as he sat in the small boat, clutching his Penn 850 SS rod, praying for a nice fat fish. There was the one thought which had plagued him for the past year, finally driving him to take this vacation, perhaps even quit his job. He kept that thought a secret, buried deep within him most of the time. He could forget about it for now. Catalina. The Pacific. Sun. So far removed from his nightmares. The island so close, and yet far enough away that no sounds could be heard from the tourists on shore. He was soaking it in: the cool spray of mist as the boat rocked. The flatness of the light across the water. The heat at the back of his neck from the sun. The feeling that one of his legs had fallen asleep. The first twenty-four hours on Catalina had been spent recovering from the stress of work; the next twenty-four in just wanting to get out of bed and do something.

And now, he wished things could always be the way they were, right at this moment.

Right now.

How beautiful his wife was to him. Beyond her dark skin, and her Latin eyes, how much she had taught him in their fourteen years together, through the fights and the trials, how things had worked out as if they'd been meant to.

There was a loveliness in her he could not find when he looked at other women. It went further than flesh and bone. It was some spark within her. He grinned as he watched her. She was everything to him, sometimes. Before he'd met her, he had been stupid, a clod, someone who was destined to muddle through life uneventfully. After meeting her, well, to him at least, it had been like a magical transformation. Love itself had become the most powerful transformer he had ever encountered. He knew of men who took their wives for granted, but he was not one of them.

"Trey," she said, calling him by his family nickname. "Trey?"

He leaned toward her, because apparently she was about to tell him a secret.

She whispered, "I got to go, sweetie. Right now."

"So lady-like."

"I thought so."

"I told you not to bring so many sodas," he sighed.

"I know. Why is this such a problem? You haven't exactly been reeling them in." She half-grinned. "Besides, you guys have it easy. You can just hang it off the side of the boat. I'd have to lean over the edge and probably capsize the whole thing." Then, she gripped his hand, and said, almost sternly, "I really have to go."

* * * * *

Starting the motor was difficult. He had to put all his weight into it, pushing his feet against the transom as he pulled on the rope. The boat rocked less gently. Carly clung to the sides of it. Finally, he got it going, and steered towards shore.

It took half an hour to bring the boat back into the dock. It was early in the day, so the tourist boats were still circling around Avalon. He had to maneuver his small fishing boat around to the side of the docks, and then, kill the motor and row in. As soon as they pulled beside one of the low docks, Carly practically leapt off the boat, leaving him rocking. She ran in her bathing suit, towel around her waist, carry-all slung over her shoulder, towards the restrooms.

He wiped his forehead -- it was going to be a hot day -- and grabbed a Dr. Pepper out of the cooler. His nickname, Trey, came because, as the oldest son in his family, he was named William Campbell the Third, or Trés in French, which became anglicized. So he had been dubbed, Trey -- only his closest friends and family used this name for him. Most of his co-workers knew him as Billy Campbell.

Work was a different identity in more than name alone. He never thought about it when he was home, or on vacation (like this particular week). He had always hoped to get into another line of work, but now, after fourteen years, he could do his job by rote. His and Carly's incomes combined were enough to make them more than comfortable. He wasn't even sure he could do anything else for a living -- it wasn't like he was a doctor, or even a therapist -- he was a psych tech, a supervisor, and even though it was a secure position, he had never, when he got into it in his early twenties, expected to make it a career. He'd intended to go on and get a master's and maybe become a therapist, but then Teresa had been born, and then Mark, and Carly was actually able to go on and finish her master's...and then the money and security at Darden State became so good, how could he walk away from that? With kids and a life, how could he make a change without disrupting the entire flow of the world?

But now, he was considering quitting his job to start over because the stress had really gotten to him with recent events. Carly was making enough to cover for both of them, if they drew their belts in tight. He could maybe go back for that graduate degree...In these seven days on Catalina, he was going to figure out what the hell he was going to do with the rest of his life. His dream was to live in a Jimmy Buffet song and bum around on islands like this one to the end of his days. He knew this wasn't the most practical of plans, and would definitely not put Mark and Teresa through Stanford in the future. Neither would that plan entirely wash with Carly.

But, he thought looking over at the old casino and the hills beyond it, as another magnificent day unfolded in Avalon, wouldn't it be nice? No more Darden State, no more fears, no more stress, no more nightmares about the more extreme patients coming for me. No more remembering Jo-Jo ripping his genitals off with his hands, or of Lorena Davis, naked and drenched in her own blood, using the broken off fluorescent rod as a weapon, jabbing at him. These were the basics of Darden State, and that word that dare not speak its name in these politically correct times:

As if the word "fear" could be written with light against darkness.

His beeper began vibrating in his shirt pocket.

"Damn it," he muttered, knowing it was some emergency from work that he probably didn't even need to know about it. He couldn't leave Darden State for even three days before Jim Anderson messed up and gave the wrong meds to the wrong patient.

At least, he hoped it was something that simple.

Later, he would remember how innocent things were just a moment before he made that phone call.

Later, he would remember even the smell of the sea, wood-rotted and fishy, as part of a wonderful innocence that would never again exist for him.

CHAPTER 2

The Darden State Hospital for the Criminally Insane takes up twenty-three acres, and has its own post office. So, officially, it is located in Darden, California, although the town which encircles it is called Caldwell. It is in Riverside County, just north east of Moreno Valley, in a large canyon between two ridges. Its chain-link fences are twenty feet high, and, at the top, encircled with coiled razor wire. Within the tall outer fence there is a shorter fence, less than ten feet high, which carries a thin electric current, enough to stun a human being for several minutes. Twenty years ago, it only had one high fence, but every once in a while a patient escaped. The town of Caldwell was none too appreciative of hearing the lone siren, a leftover from air raid days, after midnight, signaling that one of Darden's finest was on the run.

The history of Darden is the history of America's attitude towards both criminals and mental illness. The hospital was built in the 1890s, and originally was completely underground. In those days, a paranoid schizophrenic who had murdered or committed some anti-social crime was treated worse than an animal -- chained to a wall, food pushed with a stick through the slot in the door. The underground chambers prohibited escapes, and the community at large did not have to be reminded of the hospital's existence. There were fewer than ten percent of the patients with a history of criminal activity; many of them were alcoholics and drug-addicts who were placed there by loving families.

Darden remained underground until just after World War Two, when it became a center for lobotomies and radical treatments, ice baths, shock treatments -- one doctor used to walk room-to-room, and randomly shock patients whenever the mood took him. Sometimes, it was the best treatment available.

The patients who arrived at Darden began to come by way of the criminal justice system, a famous court in Los Angeles, 95-A, which was also known as the Zoo because of the outbursts from those suffering from psychotic rages during their hearings. With this new class of patient, Darden became known as the Crackup Palace, a joking reference to the comparative luxury with which some of its patient-inmates lived. There were escapes occasionally, reaching an all-time peak of three a year within two decades.

In the 1960s, with the availability and research with psychotropic drugs, pills became the favorite candies of Darden. The ten and fifteen foot high fences went up, and the nearly-constant escapes dropped dramatically with the constant sedation of the more dangerous patients, and with a more recreational approach to patient-care. The Darden patient now wears an orange Darden T-shirt, and has calisthenics in the morning, recreational therapy in the afternoon, can call friends collect, can accept calls and money from outsiders. Occasionally, if they were sneaky enough, the patients can even make love, as the hospital is not only made up of both male and female patients, but they are allowed to intermingle freely at certain times of the day. The belief is that the various meds which each patient ingests keeps them far enough away from his or her true feelings so as to be safe.

But even passion cannot be drugged or shocked from a man's system.


* * * * *

It was at five a.m. that Rob Fallon glanced down the hallway to see if the night shift whore was still in the hallway.

His roommate slept on, snoring every now and then to punctuate the delicious silence of dawn. Rob loved that hour. That moment. It was as if the entire ward was drugged and groggy, and no one, not even the orderlies, could think clearly so early in the day.

It was two hours before the night shift personnel went home.

Ten minutes before the night shift whore walked down the hallway. Her shoes tapping the newly waxed floor. Her heavy orthopedic shoes. Her fat ankles. Her smell. Her taste.

The corridors gleamed in the long stretch of fluorescent lights from above. It was a green glow, from the recent paint job, done, Rob knew, because the state inspector would be coming in a week. There was a grapevine among the patients, and someone at Patton State, over in San Bernardino, had come to Darden for some tests, and mentioned the inspector's visit there. So, that's why the flowers were planted out on the edge of the baseball field, and that's why the kitchen smelled of bleach and that's why Dr. Wijiwardene was conducting physical evaluations all month long.

The why of things was very important to Rob. He had been taught about the why of things early in life by his mother. Her why was to create him. That was her sole reason for existence. His mother taught him all the whys. She was a brilliant woman, but ultimately, she had outlived her why. All women did.

He had a why: he was a child of God, and that was why he was on earth, to just be. That was his why. He was a young man -- twenty-six -- who had a genius I.Q. Under different circumstances (he thought) might have been a world leader or a brilliant poet. Instead, he had murdered three of his girlfriends, keeping their heads in water in his kitchen sink. The sink was large, the industrial kind. It could've fit a few more heads, but Rob had been arrested before he could collect another one. The heads still spoke to him when he was by himself, and they told him about all the secrets of the world. They told him about the whys. He told the policeman who arrested him that just because he cut off their heads didn't mean they had stopped living. They were still there, hiding from him, talking to him, telling him that they loved him. The heads.

Rob tried to show remorse for his crimes, but he didn't really understand remorse, or guilt, or shame. Still, he was very good convincing women that he wallowed in misery and pain.

And he was one of the most beautiful creatures in all of creation. He had been told so on countless occassions throughout his life. He was an Adonis from his earliest years, and women had always loved him. Always.

That was why the night shift whore was in love with him. That was her why -- with women, he knew, the why usually had to do with love.

Donna Howe.

She was ugly, a dog's dog, a two-bagger hump. She had a nose like a potato, and skin scarred and mottled with pits and craters. She was six-foot-two, broad shoulders, no boobs, a rear end like two old sagging pumpkins left out too long after Halloween. She'd remained a virgin 'til she was forty-one, which is when Rob first did her. She was a beast on the outside, but a total romantic within. She was meant to be used. She was meant to be taken by him.

Six weeks ago.

She had been easy to seduce. She had never had a date, and Rob looked like a hunk, he knew it. He knew how to get a girl to like him, any girl. He could've written a book on it: you just find out what they like in a guy, and then you become that thing, that guy, that dream.

It was always so easy for him.

It was time, now, for her weekly dose of his lust, so Rob gave a whispery whistle, knowing that the night shift whore would be waiting, listening just for this sound. She had never had it so good, he knew, and she was just about at the point when she would do anything for him.

He didn't plan on killing her.

He didn't consider himself a killer. He had never killed anyone. He had cut off his girlfriends' heads, but it hadn't killed them. They had kept talking, telling him about the men their bodies were still humping, all the tens of thousands of men who were laying them, even, now, humping them all over, every orifice they had, and then some. Humping. Doing. Making. He couldn't say the F word, just like he couldn't say the V word. He couldn't even think them. He had only used those words once