Date: 2010-10-18 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror
Description: Welcome to the town of Rising. A place where everyone knows everyone else. A place where no one locks their doors. A place where everyone's worst fears...are about to come true.

Rising Fears

by

Michaelbrent Collings

Copyright © 2011 by Michaelbrent Collings

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author. For information send request to L@whoisbillyjones.com.

website: www.michaelbrentcollings.com
email: L@whoisbillyjones.com

cover image © 2011 used under license from Shutterstock.com

DEDICATION

To...

James Dashner, a gentleman in the truest sense,
who read a book because he was asked...

Brandon Mull, who was a great guy when we were young,
and who continues (for some reason) to take my calls...

and to Laura, FTAAE.

***

PROLOGUE:
UNCAGED

***

In spite of her name, Amy-Lynn Rand was not a small-town girl. Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, it had seemed like the probable end of the world when she got married to a man who not only haled from an improbably small town in Washington, but was determined to return to it someday.

She had put off the inevitable for seven years. Seven good years. Then she had finally gotten pregnant, and looked around at the big city for the first time through the eyes of a mother-to-be...and shuddered.

The avenues and promenades that had seemed so inviting and fun to a woman of twenty were now harbingers of doom to her. Boardwalks that had once beckoned now seemed like nothing but warrens for child molesters and potential murderers.

Amy-Lynn, the big city girl with the small town name, looked around her beloved Los Angeles, and for the first time in her life she shuddered rather than smiled.

They moved back to the town where her husband Ron had been born, back to Rising, Washington, and though Amy-Lynn would have been the first to admit that the move was one borne of fear, she also would have been the first to admit that the end of her trip carried almost as much foreboding as her beginning had.

Within six hours of her arrival in Rising, however, she realized two things: first, that her only idea of small-town living came from television shows where small towns were most often portrayed as the birth-place of bigots and busy-bodies; and second, that those shows had clearly been written by big-city folks with no more idea of what a small town was like than she had had.

Instead of insular life, she found the people open to the point of being a shock to the system. She and her husband had arrived late, Ron driving the small U-haul that carried every one of their meager possessions - only enough to furnish the small apartment that was all they could afford in Los Angeles. Amy-Lynn had fretted about how they would get everything unloaded: Ron's family were all dead or moved away, and at seven months pregnant she knew she wasn't much for the heavy lifting. Ron, however, had merely smiled in a particularly infuriating way and chuckled whenever she broached the subject.

But sure enough, within ten minutes of opening the back of the U-haul, there were a pack of neighbors, passers-by, and even two sheriff's deputies that were all buzzing like ants in and out of the house, each of them summoned not by a phone call or a plea for aid, but merely by the fact that there was someone new in the neighborhood, and that someone needed help. Amy-Lynn found herself being coddled in her own home as the wives in the area descended on her as well, each bearing not just friendship, but also foodstuffs for the pantry - nothing frozen, they all knew from experience that the movers wouldn't want or be prepared to deal with frozen items just yet - and advice for the new mother.

She felt like she had somehow managed to get to heaven without the burdensome and occasionally messy process of dying getting in the way.

Now eight years after moving to Rising, the view was of the same idyllic small town that it had been eight years ago.

Main road.

A schoolhouse, for grades K through twelve, a small brick building that somehow managed to convey both an inviting air and one of permanence, as though the building could speak and was even now telling all that it had gone through many long winters...and expected to go through many more.

Behind the schoolhouse was a small football field, the pride of the town, where each Friday night almost everyone for twenty square miles could be found.

A few children were out riding their bikes in the waning light of day, a few honest-to-goodness Bicycle playing cards in their bike spokes. Amy-Lynn smiled at that for a moment, then shuddered as the sound of the playing cards carried to her ears: it sounded like the flap-crack of splintering bones.

She cast her eyes around for something else to focus on, gripped by a sudden feeling of dread that she had not experienced in almost a decade, not since leaving Los Angeles.

She looked up, and saw the mist-shrouded Olympic Mountains, the huge range casting long shadows over the town in the last pale gasps of day. Usually the view comforted Amy-Lynn: the mountains exuded permanence, lending a sense of stability to an otherwise oft-changing world. Today, however, at the end of this long day, at the end of a short trip through memory that played host to darkness as much as light, the mountains seemed less like the ponderous guardians that they usually were, and more like an omen of coming doom. The mist that hung on them seemed to Amy-Lynn like the darkness that hung at the edges of so many pleasant dreams: a constant reminder that what was light could be made dim at a moment's notice; that what was lovely could be rendered vile and horrifying in an instant.

Amy-Lynn heard a creak and looked over.

The porch swing.

It was swaying gently in the evening breeze. And again the usually-charming view was one that seemed less a reminder of a pleasant afternoon sipping lemonade and more as though the ghosts of past residents were still present, still swinging in eternity, still searching for rest.

The remains of the day's lemonade still sat in glasses on the porch rail, condensation dripping from them like nervous sweat.

"Mommy!" came a youthful, high-pitched voice from inside the house, and Amy-Lynn shuddered then turned gratefully away from the view of the town, and returned her attention to her treasure, her all: her reason for life and continued reason for living.

Sean Rand was a tow-headed child of eight, bright eyes gleefully alight as he shot a marble across the kitchen floor. It rolled across the linoleum tile with a dry, brittle noise, then hit another marble with pinpoint accuracy. Crack! went the two glass orbs, and one suddenly halted as if by magic, its momentum stolen by the second marble, which rolled away rapidly.

Amy-Lynn watched the second marble roll away, and rolled her eyes. "You got me again, Sean," she said.

Sean grinned, his perfect smile leaning a bit to one side, marred by an accident that had happened less than a year before. He had been learning to ride on a two-wheel bike, leaving behind the training wheels in favor of a much cooler dirt bike that Ron had given their son for Christmas. But though he had been a quick learner, overconfidence had come with practice, and Amy-Lynn still shuddered every time she remembered the crash: her son smashing through their oh-so-perfect white picket fence, and one of the resulting splinters leaping up as if by dark magic to spear through her son's cheek. She could still see the blood in her dreams, the dripping red that splashed - so much, too much - on the white of the fence, staining it forever.

It had turned out to be almost nothing. Just a head wound, and everyone knew - or so the old ladies on the block said with mellow sagacity - how much head wounds bled, even little ones. Still, the blood that had come out before she had managed to staunch the bleeding and get stitches - only two, head wounds really did bleed, even the little ones - had been so bright and so frightening that it still made feature appearances in her dreams, and she couldn't help but shudder whenever Sean's little cheek, still slightly scarred from the mishap, pulled to one side due to a muscle that had been torn in the accident.

The grin, even pulled to one side, however, was highly infectious, and Amy-Lynn couldn't help but smile herself as Sean clasped his hands over his head in victory and shouted, "I...am..."

And then Amy-Lynn joined in with him to finish: "...The Greatest!"

And then, as she always did when she and Sean did this victory shout, she attacked him with a flurry of hugs and tickles, stopping only when Sean started to say, "Stop it...stop it! Can't breathe!"

So she paused, just long enough for him to get his breath back, then said, "Better?" Sean nodded as he always did, and then Amy-Lynn redoubled her attack as she always did.

It was happiness. A moment of bliss that was almost - almost - enough to chase away the fearful thoughts from her mind.

Until Sean kicked out. His foot hit his marble, still sitting in a red glow on the ground. The marble rolled...

..."Oh no!" shouted Sean...

...and then it disappeared through a large, dark gap below the door that led from the kitchen down into the basement.

"Oops, there goes your marble," said Amy-Lynn, still smiling.

Sean was still smiling, too. Until he saw where the marble had gone to hide.

He stopped laughing.

Stopped smiling.

Almost, she thought, he stopped breathing.

Amy-Lynn's brow softened, and she touched Sean gently on the shoulder. "It's okay, kiddo," she said. "It's just the basement."

She moved to the door. Swung it open.

Darkness beyond. Death-black. Funeral-black. To an eight-year-old, she supposed, this may as well have been the doorway to Hell.

Sean wasn't moving. Still and silent, like a deer that knew it was only inches away from a predator; from death. He stared, terrified, into the darkness that lay beyond the basement door.

"Go on, Sean," coaxed Amy-Lynn. "There's nothing to worry about. Nothing to fear."

Sean whispered something.

"What?" said Amy-Lynn.

The boy turned to her, and she was shocked to see that his face was now streaked with tears, mere seconds after he had been laughing his bell-tone little boy's laugh.

"The monster," whispered Sean.

Amy-Lynn pursed her lips. This obsession with a monster in the basement was a new thing, almost as new as her own sudden fear of the mountains that until today had always provided peace and serenity to her. She and Ron had both tried to coax their son on numerous occasions into the basement, but in the last week or so the child had utterly refused to go, no matter what the provocation or the possible reward.

Amy-Lynn was, she thought, a patient and loving mother. But she also knew that patience and love had to be tempered with firmness and encouragement in the face of fear.

No time like the present, she thought, and gestured to her son. "Here," she said. She reached into the basement, and was almost disturbed herself to see how completely her hand disappeared into the murky blackness that began only inches beyond the doorjamb.

Has it always been this dark in the basement? she thought. And on the heels of that thought came another, unbidden and strange: What if something does pull me in?

But she cast that thought out of her mind. Pushed it to the back, to the dark spaces in her brain where misty mountains and bone-cracking cards cast long shadows in the dim and threatened to become monsters in the basement of her own heart.

She flicked on the basement light. She moved urgently, quickly, as though speed of limb would cast out unease of mind.

"Look," she said, and gently drew the nearly struggling Sean with her partway into the basement.

Light flooded the place. Laundry. Food storage. Tools hanging neatly from racks.

And Sean's marble, clearly visible in the dead center of the clean basement floor.

Dead center, she thought, and shuddered within herself. The monsters in the dim parts of her mind rasped and writhed.

Again, however, she pushed them out of her thoughts, feeling a bit silly about the irrational fear that was suddenly beleaguering her. There was no place to hide in the basement. No shadows, nothing remotely creepy about the place.

She pulled her son back with her into the kitchen, feeling him relax, until....

Click. She turned off the light again, then gestured for her son to try. "Now you," she said. Sean tensed immediately, his small muscles going rigid under the lightweight cotton of his T-shirt. "Go ahead," she urged. "There's nothing down there, honey."

He looked at her, and she was dismayed to again see tears shimmering at the corners of his eyes. But she steeled herself and continued. No son of hers would be driven by fear the way she had been for so much of her adult life. No boy of hers was going to have to be beholden to his own terrors, was going to walk in the shadow of anguish, unable to break into the sunlight that came once you exhibited courage in the face of fear.

She guided his hand forward, forward, forward. She let go, and was relieved to see that, though his lip trembled and his arm shook, he kept reaching, reaching, reaching for the light switch.

She could see him feeling along the wall. She was proud of him.

The monster must be asleep.

She pushed the thought down, where it joined with the other unbidden and unwelcome thoughts in her mind.

Sean looked at her for encouragement.

She smiled.

And then screamed as her son fell

(no pulled, he was pulled, oh God and Jesus something pulled him)

into the basement.

Amy-Lynn reacted instinctively, barreling into the doorway before the first scream came, but as fast as she was the door was faster, moving on well-oiled hinges and slamming shut in front of her.

She heard her son, screaming on the other side of the suddenly closed door. She heard the click of a latch engaging, and shook the door handle even though she knew it would be a futile gesture. When it was locked, as she had somehow known it would be, she barreled into the door, pounding at it maniacally with all the force she could muster, listening to her baby boy screaming on the other side.

She attacked the door, clawing at it like a feral beast. Screaming sounded on both sides of the door now: the panicked shrieks of a boy in terror, and the blood-curdling mews of a mother trying to get to her child.

Mother-screams, child-screams, and the door was buckling and shaking, incredible violence causing it to quiver on its hinges, and Amy-Lynn could not be sure if the shaking was because of her or because of some other terrifying, unknown force on the other side of the door.

She kept clawing at the door, at the door jamb, at the doorknob, frantic, the movements sending shocks of sound through the house as her panic-soaked muscles worked frenzied music on the wood and metal.

Then she slowed as she became aware of another noise, one underneath the sounds she was making. Low, guttural, growling. The sound of damnation come to visit.

And at the sound, the doorway splintered as something hit it from the basement side. Something powerful. Deadly.

Sean stopped screaming. Suddenly. Forever.

Amy-Lynn redoubled her efforts, trying to get in, to break in, to find her way in to her boy, to her baby.

She couldn't do it.

But still she tried, until exhaustion drove her inexorably to her knees in front of the door, a weeping mass of threadbare muscle and pain-ridden mind.

Then....

Click.

The door...

...swung...

...open.

Amy-Lynn looked into the basement. Only a few moments before it had been clean and inviting, full of light and the easy order of a house well kept. Now, it was dark. Dim. Frightening.

Amy-Lynn looked into the basement, trying to pierce the darkness with eyes weary from screams and tears.

She looked into the basement.

And finally, she saw.

And began to scream.

And was still screaming three hours later, when Ron came home to find her curled on the floor in front of the basement, shrieking and screaming and praying to God to send her back her son.

***

ONE

***

He follows his prey from a distance. Wouldn't want them to know about him. Not yet, at any rate. Not when there is still fun to be had.

He is in his thirties. Some would say plain, some would say handsome; his is the kind of face that attracts many, but repels just as many.

He knows the woman ahead of him will be attracted. He knows. And smiles.

He watches them walk for almost a quarter mile. At one point they almost spot him, but he manages to look behind a street vendor's produce stand in time, and they continue on unaware.

The woman is in her late twenties. He knows this, for he knows everything about her. He knows that she is twenty-eight, just as he knows that she loves to watch butterflies in the spring and her favorite food is chocolate chip waffles with real maple syrup.

He also knows everything about the boy. The boy is only a few years old, but beautifully precocious. One of the boy's hands holds onto his mother's hand; the other clutches a pad and a handful of crayons. Both the pad and the crayons were a gift from the boy's father: a man who does not deserve either the woman or the boy.

The man increases his speed, coming to within a half block of his quarry.

He reaches into his jacket, his fingers brushing the cold steel of the gun that he always holds there. But now is not time for a gun. Instead he reaches past it. He brings out a cell phone; dials.

Ahead of him, he can barely hear the electronic chirp as the woman's own cell phone rings. He knows her number.

She pulls her phone from her purse, and he hears her click the button to answer. "Hello?" she says.

The man does not answer. That would not be fun. Instead he merely...breathes.

"Hello?" she repeats.

"I see you," he whispers, and sees the woman stiffen for a moment.

"What?" says the woman. "Who is this?"

The man breathes heavily into the phone. Perverse. "You know who it is," he says, and knows from the way her posture changes that she does indeed know. She knows him well. A moment later he says, "Who's the little boy?"

It's a game he likes to play. He knows how she will answer.

"It's," she says, and pauses as she thinks of a lie. "It's the gardener's kid."

The man's face changes suddenly, drawn long in a gross parody of surprise as he shouts, "I knew it! I knew you were sleeping with him!"

The woman laughs up ahead, a tinkling laugh that could cut through the worst fears of the worst day like a Ginsu knife. The man laughs, too.

"Don't tell my husband, though," says the woman into the phone, still laughing. "It'd break his heart."

The man laughs all the harder at this. "You're killing me, Elizabeth." And ahead of him, the woman, Elizabeth, laughs even harder, great belly laughs now that are causing the few passers-by on the street to look at her in askance. "And after I did all that sexy breathing for you and everything." He pants into the phone some more.

"Stop, Jason, not in front of our son," Elizabeth answers. "Aaron's getting too smart for you to keep pulling this kind of nonsense."

"I know," answers Jason. "He almost spotted me cold a few blocks ago. Gonna be a police detective like his daddy someday."

And upon hearing his name, the boy shouts, "Is that Daddy?"

"He's on the phone," says Elizabeth, and hands the boy the phone.

"Hi, Daddy," says Aaron. "Where are you?"

"Right behind you, kid," answers Jason. Aaron turns and sees his father. He waves the hand with crayon and papers at Jason. "I drawed you a picture, Daddy," he shouts into the phone. Jason laughs at the confusion his son still has regarding the cell phone: he knows it is to help you talk to people far away, but still thinks he has to shout to be heard.

"Can't wait to see it, bud," answers Jason. "Your pictures are the best."

And ahead, he sees his son thrust the phone back to his mother, then grab her hand and start pulling at her. "Hide from Daddy, Mommy! Hide from Daddy!"

Jason can hear his son's laugh, and it warms him like a cup of hot chocolate on a cold winter's day. Elizabeth has barely a second to say into the phone, "Looks like you're going to have to chase us, honey," before she hangs up and runs with her son.

Jason puts his own cell phone back into his pocket, almost scratching himself on the LAPD badge that hangs from his belt. He laughs and gives chase, going slowly so as not to gain ground too quickly - wouldn't want to disappoint Aaron - but catching up, bit by bit.

His family disappears around a corner, and he follows the laughter, bright as sunlight in this moonless, starless city of the Angels where the city has chased away the sky. He turns the corner as well, moving quickly onto an adjoining street, laughing like the worst kind of madman: the kind of man who has somehow managed to find a way to be truly happy.

Then the laughter dies in his throat. Like most cops, Jason has a kind of sixth sense that often activates before his other five senses have picked up on anything; a subconscious feeling that something is amiss.

He casts his gaze about, looking for his family.

They are nowhere to be seen.

Then he hears a short yelp. A child's cry.

He looks to the sound and sees...his wife's feet, kicking, flailing as something drags her into a dark alleyway.

Aaron is nowhere to be seen.

"Elizabeth!" shouts Jason, and draws his gun at the same instant. He flicks the safety off, which is technically a violation of LAPD rules, but dammit this is his family and he's not going to wait until the last second to be ready to kill or be killed.

He runs to the alley.

And as he does, time...

...slows...

...down....

All sound fades. All Jason can hear is his own tortured, panicked breathing; his own arrhythmic heartbeat.

Elizabeth's feet disappear into the darkness of the alley.

Jason is almost there. But too slow. Moving too slow.

Something rolls out of the alley: a single crayon. Black.

Complete silence, save only the sound of blood pumping in his ears.

He runs as though through syrup, cloying and nasty, pulling him one step back for every two steps that he takes.

He can hear his watch ticking. Slow. Everything is slow. Tick...tick...tick....

Then, at last, a pair of hard, fast sounds pierce the night: two gunshots.

Jason screams. And riding the crest of that wave of sound, he feels it end as it always does. He feels time speed up again, feels sound return to the universe. But only for a moment. Not long enough to see their faces, thank God. Just long enough to know that all is gone, just a single moment of terror and loss before...

***

...Jason Meeks, ex-cop, ex-husband, ex-father - ex-everything - woke up.

He looked around. As they always were when he awoke from what he thought of as The Dream, his fingers were stretched out in front of him, reaching toward the sky as though hoping to grasp the fleeing souls of his family before they escaped to a Heaven he no longer believed in.

How could there be a God when He has taken everything from me? he thought for the thousand-thousandth time. And for the thousand-thousandth time, he got no answer.

He closed his fingers, which were cramped from the exertion of his night terrors, which were the worst kind: the kind that are real. Memories were more fearful to Jason than any kind of fictional concoction his subconscious could possibly have discharged.

They're gone.

He sat up, feeling the gnarled bark of the tree he had been sleeping against bite at his back ruthlessly, as though he had offended it by taking his rest at its base. He cricked his back, feeling old, older than his years warranted. He flexed his fingers, working the cramps and stiffness out of them, then stretched in the gray twilight of predawn, the first singular shards of sunlight slicing across the horizon like blood in dark sand, not illuminating so much as highlighting the darkness that still remained.

Jason's mood matched the ambience perfectly, whatever joy he had felt at the beginning of The Dream marred and overshadowed by the darkness of the end.

He felt stinging tears at the corners of his eyes and wiped them quickly on his jacket, the rough fabric of his camouflaged hunting jacket scraping at his skin, waking him up through the heady salve of discomfort, the healing balm of pain. He reveled in the pain, let it hold him like a mother holds a child, let it take away the greater pain of his memories, leaving him exhausted and broken in its wake...but alive.

For what? he thought. Why go on?

He looked around him for an answer. He was in the forest outside of Rising, the thick foliage his only ceiling, the trees his only walls. No cell phones, no radios, no nothing. Just him and the hunt.

He came out here every year. Every year on the anniversary of his loss, he got as far from city life - as far from everything - that reminded him of that night as he could. Came away to hunt and be alone. He usually came back with some kind of animal, which he dutifully had the town butcher cut into portions that he doled out to the less affluent members of Rising's populace, saving only the roughest cuts - the only parts he deserved - for his own freezer.

This year, he was empty handed. For the first time since he had begun this strange hideaway practice, he had yet to see anything more than a few small squirrels and rabbits, game that would make no sense to kill, and would provide him with little meaning in his hunt. Sometimes he felt like the food he brought back for the poor was the only real reason he had for going on.

He looked down at his rifle, a Browning A-bolt that gleamed in the trace scratches of daylight. It was a bolt-action rifle, one round already chambered and ready.

Ready.

Almost without thought, Jason tilted the rifle and pressed the barrel against the hollow of his jaw, where his neck and head joined. He could just reach the trigger with his thumb.

Ready.

He had no conscious thought of wanting to die. Indeed, that was perhaps the worst thing: the absolute lack of feeling, the complete sense of isolation from everything that had wrapped him like a thick shroud ever since he had seen his wife and son lowered into the ground.

He felt himself as though watching another person. He felt himself turn off the safety. He felt himself whisper a last "I love you" to a wife long-dead. He felt his hand clench, and felt his thumb pull on the trigger....

It was the sound that almost killed him. It was a sharp, brittle snapping sound that reminded Jason of the noise a perp's arm had once made when Jason had caught him in the act of robbing a corner liquor store. The perp had been a kid, only sixteen, but he had had a gun and drug-crazed eyes that clearly shouted his intentions to kill anyone who stood between him and his next score. Jason had rushed him, grabbed his gun, and ended up breaking his arm across the counter of the liquor store. The sound the arm had made when it broke, the bone itself exploding out of the man's - no, the boy's - skin like a yellowed stick, had haunted Jason's dreams for weeks after. And the sound he heard now was just as unpleasant.

Jason jerked, and nearly pulled the trigger.

He did not, however. Not quite. He didn't pull the rifle away from its resting spot, but looked around for the source of the noise.

He saw it almost instantly.

The buck was beautiful. Tall and graceful, a survivor of countless battles for supremacy, a warrior of its kind. Its antlers almost glistened in the dawn's waxing glow, the many points illuminated like stars. Its chest heaved, bright white against the green of the forest, its breaths measured and strong.

It looked at Jason. Their eyes locked.

It was a moment out of a storybook, out of a fairy tale. A magical moment. For a split-second, Jason truly understood what "communing with nature" meant: not some hippy retreat into the woods to defecate into leaves and eat grubs and concentrate on "finding yourself," but a real sense of...of...Jason struggled to find the right word and finally settled on one that he almost never used any more, a word as alien to his existence as almost any other: connection.

He and the deer were connected. He could almost feel the wind through his fur, the clash of antlers as mating challenges issued, the rutting flesh as the prizes were taken. He could feel himself running noiselessly over the earth, the ground almost goading him on to ever-greater speed.

He felt himself...alive.

The tears came now, the tears that Jason had successfully quelled after The Dream, falling from cheeks that had not known such moisture since the funeral. He saw the deer, he felt the deer, and he wept for all that it was, because he knew that the deer was more a part of the world than he was, and would be more sorely missed when gone.

The moment shattered, though, when the deer did something Jason had never seen such an animal do in all the time he had lived in the small rural town of Rising, Washington: it snarled at him. At first, Jason couldn't believe his eyes. Deer, even the large ones, would almost uniformly flee when confronted. The only reason they wouldn't was when one of their offspring was threatened, and even then such a visible outpouring of viciousness and rage was something the likes of which Jason had never heard of before.

The deer mewled, a cold, ugly sound in the crisp air, then stomped its hooves...and charged.

Suddenly, the magic of the moment became dark magic. Twilight was not blessing, but curse. Jason felt the rifle fall from fingers made numb with sudden terror.

The huge animal was only ten feet away.

Jason scrambled to right himself and grab the fallen rifle at the same time; scrambled to get into position to save himself while at the same time marveling that he suddenly cared so much about living.

Eight feet.

Jason's searching fingers touched steel.

He brought the rifle up in a slow arc, time slowing just as it had that night...

(No, don't think of that, not now, not here.)

...slowing and preventing him from doing what he had to do, from doing what had to be done if he was to save himself.

Five feet.

The deer's eyes were dark, possessed.

Four feet.

Now the whites showed as the buck's eyes rolled back.

Three feet.

It dropped its chin.

Two.

The tips of the stag's antlers still shone in the light, no longer like gleaming stars but now more like daggers that had been dipped in blood.

One....

***

TWO

***

The sun was still rising when Jason had finished getting the deer on his truck, and the sun was even now casting its first pale light over the slit in the forest that passed for a road.

The truck jounced and bounced along the dirt path, the truckbed almost entirely filled by the deer whose throat had been destroyed by Jason's single shot. The deer had shuddered to a stop only inches away from his feet, the glitter on its antlers dying as it did, as though they had been kept alight by the same life force that had dimmed and died as the blood pumped out scarlet onto the undergrowth.

The truck gave a large shudder as it jumped the small lip of asphalt that marked the main road into town. Sure enough, a moment later Jason passed the familiar sign: "Rising, Washington. Come and sit for a spell."

Only a few short minutes later he was pulling up next to Rising's small town hall, a single story building with a short clocktower that managed to seem like it was looming over everything even though it was only about forty feet high. The clock chimed quietly, haunting notes that glided through the early morning mist. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Six a.m.

Jason stopped his truck and got out. He checked the deer carcass, though he knew full well that it had not moved - how could it? - and then went into the small brick building beside the town hall.

The office inside the building was barely twenty feet to a side. A five foot by five foot reception area, a doorway that led to the three holding cells in back, and another door that was simply marked "Sheriff" were the only real accoutrements. Jason picked up the phone in the reception area, an old black rotary dialer, and frowned as he heard static interfering with the dial town. He jiggled the switch, trying to get a better link, then shrugged and dialed a number.

A phone answering machine picked up, as he knew it would, and George's pale, wispy voice breathed out, "George here. You know what to do." Jason was surprised to hear how weak sounding the voice was: usually the man's voice was a deep bass, full of life and vigor. And this, though still recognizably George's voice, seemed as though it must be the voice of some funhouse George: a twisted caricature of the real thing, shrunk and distorted by trick mirrors and failed perception.

Jason chalked the change up to whatever was interfering with the phone reception and spoke into the phone. "George, it's Jason Meeks. I'm back from my hunting trip. Shot a twelve-point that I need you to put in the freeze until I can get settled and take care of him. Could you come by the station and pick it up when you get in?"

Jason hung up, assured that George - the town butcher and one of the most conscientious workers that Jason had ever met - would be along as soon as business had opened to take care of the buck. The charitable giving of the best cuts of meat had become a shared ritual between them, a time of sharing between the two men that neither spoke of but that Jason suspected meant as much to the butcher as it did to him.

After concluding his business with the butcher, Jason went through the door marked, "Sheriff." His office was as drab and basically uninteresting as was the rest of the place: a desk, a computer, a few filing cabinets, and a fan were all that would tell a visitor that the place was inhabited.

And the picture. Meeks purposefully did not look at it. Rather, he opened one of the file cabinets and pulled out a spare uniform. He had bathed and shaved in a cold river the night before, so he knew he was reasonably clean, and anyway he rarely felt like going home after his yearly hunt, so he had prepared this uniform for his return after the ten day isolation. He slipped out of his hunting fatigues and into the uniform, a green and brown outfit that was pleasing to Jason, or at least, was as pleasing as anything was these days. Which wasn't saying much.

He took a moment to adjust the Sheriff's star on his chest, then sat down.

He glanced at the digital clock on the desk. It said eight twenty two. He frowned. The clock was off. Either that or the one on the clocktower was, which was unlikely.

A moment later, however, he heard the clock outside ring again. Eight rings followed by a short melody: eight thirty. Jason shook himself. What had happened to the time? Occasionally when he was alone, he did lose track of time, and it always both annoyed and frightened him: just one more example of his growing lack of connection to life and the universe in general.

He finally looked at it. The photo was on his desk, as it always was and always would be. Elizabeth and Aaron, smiling as though nothing could ever touch them. As though they would live forever and would not be gunned down in cold blood by a man who simply wanted to kill someone that day. Jason touched the picture gingerly. Family.

Gone.

He drew his service pistol, a nine-millimeter Beretta, and laid it on the desk before him.

He felt at his pocket. Withdrew a single object: a bullet. It was golden, gleaming with wicked beauty appropriately reminiscent of the day that his family had died: surely a day graced with their beauty before it had ended in such wicked senselessness.

He chambered the bullet. Stared at the gun.

But as it had with the deer, it seemed fate would not allow Jason the respite of death this day: there was a knock at the door. In a smoothly practiced motion, Jason ejected the bullet and pocketed it a half-second before the door swung open.

On the other side of the door was Hatty Cooper, his receptionist. Hatty was in her late sixties, an ex-schoolteacher who had taught most of the children in Rising - including Jason before he had wandered into the fairyland of the Big City and become a police detective with the LAPD and been happy for a time before the fairy tale ended in darkness, as all true fairy tales did. Hatty was a surly soul, a brittle, no-nonsense exterior that hid - barely - a heart the size of the Olympic Mountains and a brain that was every bit its equal. If anyone told you the mayor was in charge of this town, they were either lying or they hadn't met Hatty yet.

Jason opened his mouth to greet her, but before he could she said, brusquely, "Thank the Lord you're finally back."

"Why?" asked Jason, more than a little surprised at Hatty's tone. Usually she had a kind word or two for him upon his return from the hunt.

Her next words explained instantly to him why the normally imperturbable woman was acting so uncharacteristically stressed: "Little Sean Rand's gone missing."

Jason instantly went on full alert. "What?" he said.

"We tried to find you," said Hatty, "but you can be tough to reach when you're communing."

Jason felt the breath leave his body. Sean Rand? Jason knew the boy, as everyone in Rising knew everyone else, and was still reeling inside. The boy was a beautiful, precocious child of seven or eight, he knew. And from what he had seen, the boy was not the type to go wandering off, which was the usual case when someone went missing in Rising - usually to be found only a few hours later. But everything in the way Hatty was speaking, her posture, the way she pursed her lips as she waited for Jason's next words, it all added up to something much worse than a case of a child who had wandered down the wrong path and been lost for a few hours.

"When did this happen?" asked Jason.

"A week ago," said Hatty simply.

"A week?" Jason almost shouted. Before he could follow up with a "What happened?" Hatty was already speaking again. She glanced at the wall clock and said, "Memorial service is about to begin at the cemetery."

Jason blinked. This was all coming at him too fast. "Memorial service?" he said. "You said he was missing, not dead."

Without waiting for a reply, Jason hurried out the door. "Fill me in on the way," he said, and then left the Sheriff's station, Hatty at his heels.

He hustled around to the driver's side of his truck as Hatty opened the passenger's side and got in. Then Jason stopped in his tracks before touching the door.

The truck bed was empty.

No deer.

Bloody ropes lay coiled in messy piles: ample evidence that the buck had been there. But wherever it was, it was no longer in the truck. Nor would the butcher have taken it already. George typically did not do his pickup until help had arrived at the store, usually around ten or eleven in the morning.

But Jason had no time to do more than be disturbed by the absence of the corpse. He hopped in the truck, joining a visibly impatient Hatty. They drove in silence for a short time, a few moments that allowed Jason to notice the funereal gloom that had settled like a fog over the town. Corner store, post office, feed barn, all closed. The houses were shut as well, and there was an unusual absence of children and their mothers playing and walking along the streets.

"Why a funeral service?" Jason finally asked Hatty. "You said he's just missing."

"They...." Hatty began speaking, but her voice petered out into nothing almost instantly.

"What, Hatty?" asked Jason. "Now's not the time to be demure." He looked over at her, his voice softening instantly as he realized that for the first time in his memory Hatty was on the verge of breaking into tears. "Sorry, Hatty," he whispered, and patted her shoulder. "Just-"

She waved him off, drying the tears on a handkerchief that she produced from somewhere in the folds of her coat. "There was blood, Sheriff," she said in answer to his earlier question. "No body, but lots of blood."

"How much?" asked Jason, and a chill settled over him, a gloomy sense of despair that was quite different from the lifeless sense of isolated disconnection he had come to accept as his lot.

"Too much," was all Hatty said.

Jason felt his mouth thin to a bloodless slash, his lips pressed together so tightly he could literally feel the blood rushing from them. "Any witnesses?"

"One. Amy-Lynn. Little Sean's momma."

"What's she got to say about it?"

Hatty quieted again, and Jason could sense without looking that she was growing even more disturbed when asked about the boy's mother. "She hasn't said much of anything since it happened," said Hatty at last. "Locked herself in her bedroom, mumbling nonsense."

"What kind of nonsense?"

Hatty paused pregnantly, long enough that Jason wondered if he was going to have to ask the question again. Then she spoke, and her voice was raspy and dry. "She said, 'Monster got my boy. Monster stole my baby.'"

Jason blinked, then turned into the lane that led to the Rising Cemetery. It was an old-fashioned kind of place, misty and heavily treed. Beautiful in the full light of day, but in the morning when the fog still hung on it, or at night when the moon illuminated the older headstones that hunched like evil guardians in the midst of the newer and more well-maintained markers, this was the kind of cemetery that children would dare each other to enter.

"What about Sean's father?" asked Jason. He turned up a small hill, following a line of cars that were obviously here for the funeral: the cemetery was small enough that there were only a few places where new burials might occur, and as the Sheriff of Rising, Jason knew them all.

"He was at Poker night with Bill Thompson and Fred Whittaker when it happened. Ron came home and found the basement..." and here Hatty gulped as though it had been she that had made the horrifying discovery, "...looking like it did, his wife curled up on the floor."

Jason stopped the car and got out, trudging up to the large group that stood just up the hill, clearly in the middle of the service. Christ, he thought, looks like the whole town is here. Out loud, he said, "What's the FBI said about this?"

"Not a damn thing," answered Hatty. "First they wouldn't talk to me, just the Sheriff."

Jason snorted. "I was on my vaca-"

"Which I dutifully told them," Hatty interrupted. "They weren't interested. Then when I finally got through to someone who'd listen, reception on the phones started going all fuzzy. The FBI guy I talked to told me to fax him the details."

"Did you?"

"Day before yesterday."

"And?"

"No response."

They quieted as they approached the mourners at the service, Jason whispering quietly, "Why would they do this?"

Hatty looked at the assembled townsfolk. "Afraid. It's a way to keep the ghosts at bay."

"He might not even be dead," said Jason, and his voice was loud enough that some of the group turned and stared at him.

Hatty laid a hand on his arm. "Sheriff, I saw the place. Believe me, the boy is dead."

"Not until I find him, he's not," said Jason through clenched teeth. But he said it quietly, recognizing Hatty's wisdom in not voicing such opinions aloud, particularly without having any kind of a handle on what had happened here.

Daniel Wells, the pastor at Rising's one and only church, was speaking. "And though he has not been found," said the portly gentleman, "we know that all will once more be found, at the morning of the First Resurrection, when the innocent and the just will be called to Christ's side. Amen."

Whispered "amen"s greeted the end of the pastor's homily. Jason glanced around as the pastor uttered a short benediction. He noticed little Sean Rand's mother, sitting beside her husband. Ron was on his feet along with most of the rest of the assemblage, but Amy-Lynn was in a wheelchair, vacant eyes staring at nothing. She twitched occasionally, as though minute electrical shocks were being run through her body, but other than that she looked as though she were already dead herself. Ron, for his part, clearly was trying to understand what had happened to his life. Jason felt his heart tug in sympathy. He knew what it was to lose a child. To lose a son. To lose -

Stop it, he told himself. Now is not the time. Not the time.

Never the time.

The benediction ended, and mourners started shuffling past the small gravestone that had no casket beneath it. Flowers fell to the mown grass, and Jason noticed how many of the mourners were children: the Rand family was well liked in Rising, and Sean had been a rare delight.

Pastor Wells came over to Jason as the mourners filed past, and Jason felt his gut clench. He didn't have anything against the pastor as a person, but he was damned if he could see why he would ever want to attend church again. Not after what had happened. The way Jason saw it, either there was no God, or if there was then the Devil was not only real, but also much stronger than any other deity. Neither was a particularly good reason to go to church in Jason's mind. But the pastor insisted on trying to get him there every time the two bumped into one another. It was too bad, because Jason had heard that Wells played a mean game of poker and was a genuinely fun person to spend time with. But, again, if that came at the cost of having to listen to repeated invitations to church, then it wasn't worth it in Jason's mind.

"Good to see you here, Sheriff," said Wells, holding out his hand. Jason shook it. "We've missed you at church," he continued.

Jason broke off the handshake at that. "Hard to see how you could miss me, considering I've never been to your church."

"That's why we miss you, of course," said Wells with a grandfatherly grin. "Why don't you come down this week?"

"Not much to believe in these days, Pastor," said Jason. Wells opened his mouth - no doubt to dole out some platitude about the importance of believing even when it appeared there was nothing to believe in - but the sheriff cut him off before he could speak. He pointed at Sean's parents, and said, "How's the family holding up?"

Again the pastor opened his mouth to speak, and again he was interrupted. This time, however, it was by Sean Rand's mother, Amy-Lynn. The woman began shrieking. "Give him back! Bring back my baby!" She erupted from her wheelchair, throwing off her husband's restraining arm and rushing at the gravestone that marked Sean's empty grave. She began slamming the marker stone with her fists. "He's not there!" she shouted. "He's not down there! He's dead but not down there, he's down there but gone, now give him back!" The smack of her fists could be clearly heard in the calm air of the cemetery, and soon they were leaving bloody smears on the marker as her hysterical strength caused her to pound her fists to pieces against the gravestone.

Ron rushed to his wife's side and tried to pry her away from the marker, but couldn't. Jason rushed through the confused and horror-struck crowd, adding his strength to Ron's, the two of them struggling vainly against Amy-Lynn. The woman only weighed perhaps one hundred fifteen pounds, and should have been easily overpowered by the two of them, but Jason felt like he was trying to pull a mother grizzly off a honey tree.

One of the mourners, Doc Peabody, an older man who had grown up at a time when doctors still made house calls, rushed forward. "Hold her tight, Sheriff," said the doctor. He produced the black bag that he carried with him whenever he went out to visit a patient. That in itself told Jason volumes about how badly off Amy-Lynn was: the doctor had clearly come prepared for such an outbreak as this.

Doc Peabody withdrew a syringe from his bag. "She's been doing this all week," he said to the sheriff, then injected Amy-Lynn as Jason and Ron held the woman tight while she shrieked. "I was worried this would happen," said the old man as he pushed down the plunger and injected Amy-Lynn. A moment later the woman's panicked screaming had become a muted sobbing. Then she closed her eyes.

Jason felt himself - and everyone else - relax a bit as the medication took hold of the bereft mother. Then he jumped in fright as her eyes slapped suddenly open. The pupils were wide and unnaturally dark, and Jason was reminded of the buck that had charged him - had it been only a few hours ago? It already seemed like a lifetime had passed since The Dream and since the deer had attacked him.

Amy-Lynn spoke, and the voice that emerged was not entirely her own. It was dark and guttural, as though she were herself speaking from below the ground, as though she had taken the place of her son and volunteered to be buried, but had then come back from the grave with a sinister, recondite message. "The dark," she said, almost angrily. "The clocks. Time slows down. And you're all alone."

Then she shrieked, and her entire body spasmed, muscles locking in a death-like rictus. A moment later she relaxed suddenly. She slept.

Ron looked at Doc Peabody with eyes that Jason again recognized: the eyes of someone who has lived a dream, only to be wakened suddenly and brought into the angry nightmare of life.

"What do I do?" asked Ron.

"I'm going to take her back to my office, keep her there for observation," answered Doc. "If that's all right with you, that is."

Ron nodded. He laughed, and Jason could tell that the man was rapidly closing in on hysteria himself.

The mourners started trickling away, made too uncomfortable by this string of events to stay and pay any further respects.

Doc helped Ron get Amy-Lynn's limp body back into the wheelchair, then the young father made as if to follow Doc back to the medical van that was parked nearby.

Doc shook his head. "You get some rest, Ronny. She's just going to sleep for a few hours; you can come see her when she wakes."

Doc wheeled Amy-Lynn away, and the rest of the mourners dispersed. Within moments Jason was alone at the graveside with Hatty, Ron, and Pastor Wells. The pastor held Ron's arm tightly for a moment, then said, "I'll be home all day. Come by and visit if you want."

Ron nodded, but didn't really seem to see what was going on around him as the pastor departed. Jason waited until Wells was gone before he looked at Ron and said, uncomfortably, "Ron, I'm sorry. I...I know nothing will help, but I'm truly sorry."

Strangely, as he had this morning with the deer, Jason suddenly felt more connected than he usually did. This time there was an obvious reason, though: he had suddenly found a brother, one born not of the same mother, but one born of blood and loss. He and Ron both belonged to an exclusive and horrible club: the group of men who had had to bury their own children.

Ron looked at him, and saw that the man seemed to understand the same thing, because Ron suddenly embraced him tightly, then released him just as quickly, seeming almost embarrassed at his sudden display of emotion.

After an uncomfortable moment of silence, Jason said, "I'm going to come by later, if that's all right. Look around the house?"

Ron nodded, looking numb. "I won't be there, staying at my brother's place," he answered. "But the door's unlocked. Go on in."

Jason touched Ron's shoulder, then he and Hatty turned to leave.

"It got him."

Jason turned back to look at the other man. "What did you say?" he asked Ron.

"Sean was always afraid of the monster in the basement," said Ron. He giggled again, and Jason was dismayed to see the hysteria he had sensed in the man bubbling to the surface. Ron quelled it though, at least partially. "Always afraid of that monster," he repeated, and then grinned lopsidedly.

"I guess it finally got him."

***

THREE

***

Lenore Harris stood in an empty classroom, and thought about what a difference a boy could make. Sean Rand, beautiful little Sean, who so loved to draw and color and read, was gone.

Gone.

Lenore drew her gray sweater tighter around her shoulders, and shivered.

Her sweater was not the only thing that was gray about her. From her shapeless skirt to her equally unflattering blouse, from the tips of her orthopedic shoes to the scrunchy she used to pull her hair back into a severe bun, all of it was a featureless gray. An observer might think she was trying to melt into the scenery. Nor was that far from the truth. Lenore had been born extremely extroverted; the kind of child who would yell hellos to strangers a half block away, and not only that but would keep yelling until the person or people turned around and said hello back. And she had continued that way through high school, where she was the captain of the cheerleading team in a busy Chicago public school, the captain of the drama club, and a county champion on the debate team.

But all that had changed. On a single night, she had gone from a proud peacock, strutting and boasting of her beautiful plumage to all the world, to a voiceless raven, dark and hovering at the edges of life, hopeful that none would notice her. Her dress merely reflected her deep desires to remain anonymous and invisible.

Invisible was good. The monsters couldn't find you if you were invisible.

Lenore knew she was like a child, afraid in the night and pulling her covers over her head in the vain hope that the monsters that she suspected - that she knew - were out there would pass her by and leave her, this time, unmolested.

The only people that she hoped would notice her now were the children. And to them - and them alone - she could come alive. She could show herself to them because, quite simply, at eight years old they were too young to hurt her, or even to threaten her.

Of course, thoughts of hurt and threat immediately brought back memories that she would just as soon leave pressed deep within her. But almost worse for the moment were the more immediate thoughts, the more immediate reality: little Sean was dead.

She found herself standing in front of his desk, and was quite unsure how he had gotten there. But she knew that she would have to deal with this moment sooner or later. It had been more than a week, and she was perfectly aware what was being whispered over the counter at the general store and behind closed doors in every house in Rising. She knew what every parent was telling their child as they ordered them to come in early, to keep close, to stay within eyesight: the Rand boy was gone. There had been no ransom demand, no sign of him.

And, from what she had heard, there had been far too much blood in the Rands' basement to leave any hope that Sean had survived.

Even so, she had obstinately refused to clean out the boy's desk; had clung to a vain hope that the evil that wandered the world had not come to Rising, had not found its way so close to her.

Had not killed little Sean.

Still, now that the funeral had happened....

She reached into Sean's desk and began pulling papers out of it. They were drawings, crayon pictures mostly, each one proudly marked "by Sean Rand, 8" in the lower left corner. She touched each one with her hands as she removed it, knowing that this was as close as she was willing to come to saying goodbye, fighting back the tears that burnt her eyes and threatened to ruin her hard-fought composure.

Then she almost screamed as a voice said, "Excuse me."

She didn't scream, though, the part of her that was in charge of not screaming managing to successfully assert itself at the last possible moment. Instead she swiveled around and saw who it was. She wasn't surprised; had been expecting him to come by at some point, and had been wondering what to do when it happened.

"Sheriff," she said. "You scared me."

"Sorry," Sheriff Meeks answered. "Didn't mean to." He looked embarrassed, more like one of her students after a good chastising for failing to do his homework than one of the most important men in the small town of Rising. She knew why, too: a few years ago a mutual friend had determined that they would be a cute couple, and had invited them both to a movie, failing to mention to either that there would be a third party. Both she and the sheriff had been visibly mortified, though she was sure it was for different reasons. She knew that once she had been pretty, had been beautiful even. But that had been...before that one night; before she had lost what had once made her into a graceful and beautiful creature. Now, she was just plain old Lenore, struggling to stay anonymous, and was both angry that her friend had tried to set her up with Rising's most interesting bachelor, and terrified that Sheriff Meeks would tell off that same friend for trying to set him up with someone so obviously beneath him.

For his part, at least the sheriff had the courtesy not to tell her to her face what a huge mistake had been made. He was even gracious, trying to pretend he didn't find her to be an odious, used piece of trash that wasn't worth his time. He pretended to be interested in her, asking several basic questions before at last lapsing into a coma-like silence that had lasted the rest of the night. He had actually taken the trouble to pretend she was worth his time, and that both made him infinitely more interesting and attractive and served to highlight the vast gap between their relative social standings and relative worth as human beings.

She became aware that the sheriff was waiting for her to respond to his last words, but for the life of her could not remember what those words had been.

He had beautiful eyes.

She pulled herself away from that thought. It didn't lead anywhere useful or even remotely possible anyway, so she just said, lamely, "I thought I was here by myself."

"You were," answered the sheriff. Then, looking around the empty classroom, he said, "Isn't today a school day?"

"They let the lower grades have the day off. The mayor himself gave the order. For the funeral." She paused for a moment, then said, "I guess you've heard what happened."

Sheriff Meeks nodded. "That's why I'm here, actually. Wanted to look through Sean's things."

Lenore felt herself grow instantly protective. She had no children of her own, so these children who wandered temporarily into her care, each to stay only for a year before moving on to greener pastures, were as close as she would probably ever come to having offspring. Not children of her loins, but of her mind, of her heart. So the fact that anyone, even someone as clearly caring and good as Sheriff Meeks, was asking about Sean made her instantly alert and careful.

"Why do you want to see his things?" she asked.

"Because in spite of the memorial service, I haven't seen enough to believe he's dead," answered the sheriff. "So I'm going to find him."

Of course, true to what she felt about him, the sheriff had come up with exactly the right answer. Lenore nodded and gestured for him to look at the desk she was standing by. Instead, though, Sheriff Meeks held out his hand. She gave him the papers that she was holding immediately.

Their hands touched when she did it.

She almost felt a spark leap across the gap between them; came close to gasping before quelling the urge, before reminding herself who he was and more importantly who and what she was and so realizing that no matter what she felt, there was no way that the sheriff could possibly reciprocate her interest.

The pictures that he leafed through were all mostly the same: picture after picture of a cute stick figure with his hand leaning against a crude wall.

"What are all these of?" asked the sheriff.

"We read the story of the little boy and the dam last week," said Lenore. Sheriff Meeks shrugged, clearly communicating that he had never heard of it. "The one about the little Dutch boy," prompted Lenore, dropping automatically into her Teacher Mode. And seeing that the sheriff still didn't know the story, she continued, "The boy sees a crack in a dam by his village. He wants to get help, but knows that before he can tell anyone, the crack will grow and split the dam open and everyone he knows and loves will die."

"So what does he do?" asked the sheriff.

Lenore indicated the pictures that the man was holding. "He puts his finger in the crack. Plugs the hole. Saves the town."

Sheriff Meeks nodded and kept looking through the pictures, Lenore watching as he did so. They were all the same. "He must have really liked the story," observed the sheriff.

"He did."

Then the sheriff stopped suddenly. It was the second-to-last of the drawings that he held in his hand, and it was one that Lenore didn't remember ever seeing. It was the same subject, the same basic stick figure with its hand in the wall, but this time the color scheme was a bit darker, the lines a bit sloppier and more hurried, as though the young artist had been gripped by a frenzy of inspiration.

Or fear.

And underneath it all, in thick black crayon, were four words, written in childish, almost panicky scrawl:

cRak IN tHe DAm.

Lenore felt a tentacle of unease tickle the base of her spine, toying with her, bringing back not only her fears for Sean Rand, but also the ever-present threat of her memories...of him.

Thankfully the sheriff turned to the last page, and the dry death rattle of the pages turning was enough to draw her away from that line of thought.

This page held no picture. The tentacle of fear at the base of Lenore's back was joined by another, and then a third, a full-grown monster that threatened in an instant to take her away from the carefully constructed bulwarks that protected her sanity.

The last page was four words. Four more words in thick black crayon, four more words drawn in large, panicky strokes:

I wiL be FiRSt.

The words were simple; meaningless. But in spite of that, they were clearly something to fear; something of fear. Something made of that same flat nameless terror that had accompanied humanity as it walked out of the sludge of time and brought with it fear that would follow it through eternity.

"What do these pages mean?" asked Sheriff Meeks.

Lenore frowned, rubbing her arms as though she were chilled, which she was, though the day was warm enough. "I don't know, Sheriff," she answered.

Sheriff Meeks pocketed that last page without asking, and Lenore did not mind. She was grateful to have the strange four words gone from her class, as though their presence would call down doom upon any who might cross the room's threshold.

Then the sheriff tipped his hat politely - always polite, always gallant was the sheriff - and left without another word.

Lenore looked at the pictures that the sheriff had left behind. Particularly at the last one, the dark one. It was drawn not as a child's fairy tale version of a beloved story like the others had been, but rather like an attempt to draw something out of nightmare.

Lenore knew about nightmares.

She shuddered again.

cRak IN tHe DAm.

I wiL be FiRSt.

***

FOUR

***

Jason pulled up in front of the Rand house and took a moment to get himself under control. He knew he would have to talk to Lenore at some point in all this - she was Sean's teacher, after all - but the interaction had affected him more than he liked to think of. Indeed, it had shaken him to the core. In his loneliest nights in his house outside of town, he remembered their night together, that lovely night when they had been mutually tricked into something that was as close to a date as Jason had had for over a decade.

He immediately felt guilty, as he always did, for remembering the night. As though to remember it with anything approaching pleasure would be to dishonor the memory of his wife and child.

Still, he couldn't help remember it. Lenore had been so sweet, so clearly beautiful beneath the layers of shapeless clothing that she for some reason preferred. So smart, so warm.

So alive.

He had hardly been able to speak to her the whole night, so stricken had he been by her beauty, both the visible kind and the kind that she simply carried about within her soul.

Jason shook himself, trying to physically disengage himself from the memory. There was no way such a woman would ever be interested in someone like him.

And what if she were? he couldn't help but think. What would you do then?

The answer was as obvious as it was depressing: nothing. He would do nothing, would feel nothing, because to feel would be to live, and he had stopped living the same day his family had.

So he put his truck into park and got out.

He had been at the Rand house before, just as he had been at most of the houses in Rising for some reason or another. But he didn't remember it seeming so...so....

Ominous. That was the word. Ominous. Forbidding. Strange.

Alive.

It looked like a dark beast that had awakened and claimed its first victim. But only its first.

Jason walked to the front door and put out a hand. Just as Ron Rand had stated would be the case, the door was unlocked and opened to his touch. The door swung open, outside light slashing into the darkness beyond like a laser, then that same light disappearing as he entered the house and closed the door behind him.

He went straight to the kitchen. It was dark, like the rest of the house. He turned on a light. His eyes were drawn as though by a remote control to the basement door. The door and doorjamb showed signs of extreme violence, splintered and concussed.

And beyond the door, all was dark, a preternatural blackness that seemed to begin like a wall at the very point where the door had been, like the event horizon of a tiny black hole that lived in the basement; like the point beyond which nothing, not even light, would be able to escape.

Jason took a few steps toward that dark maw, then stopped abruptly as he noticed something.

The Rands' microwave oven sat on a small stand near the sink. It had a clock built in, only the clock was now unreadable. The numbers were blurred, as though out of focus, and Jason was suddenly reminded of Amy-Lynn. He remembered her at the funeral, the way she had shrieked and gone momentarily crazy at the funeral of her son. More than that, he remembered the horrific way she had spoken - that gravelly voice that was hers but somehow not hers, was as though someone or something was speaking through her. Something that had spoken about clocks.

What had she said? he wondered, then remembered:

"The dark. The clocks. Time slows down. And you're all alone."

He blinked at the memory, feeling an odd sense of disquiet as he looked again at the clock built into the microwave.

"The clocks...."

The display flickered weirdly as Jason looked at it, and he thumped the appliance with his hand.

There was no change. The numbers were still blurred as though he were seeing them through an unfocused camera.

He reached around into the dark space behind the microwave cart, groping for the plug. He found it, and yanked it out.

The numbers disappeared.

Jason plugged the appliance back in.

The numbers reappeared. Still the same. Blurred. Weird. Disquieting.

Jason decided that he'd rather not look at this - or have it behind him - and though he knew he was acting irrationally he unplugged the microwave again.

He almost laughed out loud at himself. What did he think was going to happen? Was he going to be gunned down from behind by a mad attack microwave? He snorted then, as he thought of the headlines: Cop Killed on 'Popcorn' Setting.

The thought was almost enough to goad him into plugging the damn thing back in. Indeed, he was halfway to doing so when he stopped.

Screw the headlines, he thought, and left the microwave unplugged.

He stood then and without any further thought he walked to the inky, forbidding basement. He reached his hand into the sharp demarcation between light and darkness...tense, groping.

Found the light switch.

Click.

Click-click.

No go. Whatever had happened to Sean had also broken the basement light.

Jason sighed and pulled a mag-lite off his belt. He clicked it on.

And stepped into the basement.

***

A moment after Jason Meeks disappeared into the darkness, the basement door quietly slid shut on well-oiled hinges.

A moment after that, the microwave clock turned back on. The clock was still jumpy and blurred. Glowing green in the dim of the kitchen. Glowing green, in spite of the fact that the plug was very clearly no longer even touching the outlet.

***

FIVE

***

Lenore stood beside the line of students wending its way through the cafeteria lunch line and concentrated on thinking about something other than her missing student or the almost equally disconcerting visit by Sheriff Meeks.

The air in the line was somber: even the ninth through twelfth graders were quieter than usual, with less shoving for place in line than usual.

The school knew that it had lost one of its own.

Then a small disturbance erupted nearby. Lenore turned to see Albert Gomberg stumbling away from a group of cheerleaders. She sighed: Albert was in eleventh grade, and was a target for bullies as young as ten. He was the quintessential audio-video kid: the kind of boy who volunteered to be the A-V department assistant over the summer...and brought his own video equipment because what the school had wasn't up to his standards. He was the kind of quiet, smart, shy kid that others loved to pick on. It made Lenore sad, because she knew that if something didn't change - and quickly - Albert would likely be doomed to live the same kind of life that she herself did: a life where the only alternatives were to hide or be attacked.

She walked over to the students, and as she came closer she saw that Albert was desperately trying to hide a small camcorder in his hands from the senior cheerleaders who were even now trying to viciously pull it from his grasp.

"Hey!" said Lenore, but was ignored. The cheerleaders kept pulling at him, trying to separate the boy from one of his beloved recording items. One of the girls, Sarah West, was particularly vicious, yanking at his arm as Albert, almost reduced to tears by the episode, struggled vainly to protect himself and his property.

"Hand it over, freak," said Sarah, and for a moment Lenore actually thought that the cheerleader was going to bite the younger boy. Sarah looked almost rabid, almost angry enough to do it.

"Leave me alone," cried Albert.

Lenore finally got close enough to the girls that some of them noticed her and stopped harassing Albert. Lenore was not the most imposing woman in the world - far from it - but even so, she was cloaked in that invisible yet potent aura of "teacherness" that would stop most students from acting out.

Most students.

Not Sarah West.

"What is going on here?" demanded Lenore.

"This pervert," said Sarah, and yanked again at Albert's encumbered hand, "was filming my ass."

Lenore could see Albert's ears instantly redden at the accusation; could see just as clearly that he had been engaged in no such activity.

"I wasn't, I really wasn-" he began.

"Ass-shooter," retorted Sarah.

"Sarah, that's enough," said Lenore in a voice that was as close to loud as hers ever came.

"Enough?" Sarah swiveled to focus her ire on Lenore now. "This creepazoid conspiracy-theory freakshow geek goes around filming my ass all the time and-"

"Enough!"

Lenore said the word far louder than she meant to. All activity in the cafeteria ground to a halt as everyone looked around to see what the altercation was, as though the possibility of a fight in the cafeteria were the highest form of excitement the students could conceive of.

Maybe it is, thought Lenore, and the thought saddened her immensely. So many of the students were either predator or prey, in actuality or in training, and so whenever a fight broke out they had to see it, as though watching fights would provide them with clues about how to act in their respective roles.

Sarah was also looking closely. But not at Albert anymore; Sarah was now focused intently on Lenore. The cheerleader's face was curled in a derisive, malicious smile, as though she knew all about Lenore and knew that a confrontation with this particular teacher could actually be won by a student.

"Enough or what?" asked Sarah with a snort.

Lenore blushed. Sarah might be right: Lenore was the type of teacher that even a student could get away with bullying sometimes.

Sometimes. But not today. Not when the target of the bullying was someone as obviously harmless and good-natured as Albert. Besides...Lenore had a bit of a talisman - a silver bullet of sorts - in the case of the rude young woman who now looked down her nose at her.

Lenore leaned in close and whispered her secret to the cheerleader: "You leave this boy alone right now, or I'll tell everyone why you never cheer at the swim meets."

The sentence had the desired effect: Sarah's mouth opened, then shut again. The girl's perfectly tanned face turned a shade lighter as the blood drained from it. Then she mumbled, "I'm not very hungry now," and left the line, pulling her cronies from the cheerleading team along with her.

Lenore turned to tell Albert he could go to the front of the line. It would be paltry repayment for the constant humiliation he had to stand at the hands of people like Susan, but it was what Lenore had power to do.

Albert, however, was gone. She cast her eyes around, looking to find him, and saw one of the nearby doors - the opposite side of the cafeteria from the one that Sarah had gone through, thank goodness - swinging shut as Albert went through it and disappeared.

Lenore hurried out after him, managing to catch up to him in the school's "quad" - the common area that was directly behind the cafeteria and in which the students tended to congregate after eating their lunches.

"Hey," she called. Albert didn't so much as pause. If anything, he sped up, as though afraid that Lenore would be the one to bring the next round of bullying into his life. She had to physically grab his arm to arrest his movement.

"You okay?" she asked.

Albert tried to look sullen and tough, but all he could manage was a visage of half-veiled fear. "They're all out to get me," he said.

"Sarah's just a teenage girl," Lenore said, even though the "just" was a stretch. Sarah was the most stereotypically nasty teenage girl she had ever had the misfortune to encounter. "Teenage girls can be difficult sometimes," she continued.

"It's not just them," responded Albert. "It's everyone." He blinked back tears, clearly trying vainly to hold onto whatever perceived dignity he might be retaining.

"Come on," said Lenore. "I'm sure it's not everyone."

"It is," insisted the student. "It's everyone."

Lenore touched Albert's arm. She smiled, trying to make a connection with this sad, lonely boy. "Not everyone," she said. "Not me."

Albert looked at her, and Lenore was heartened to see what looked like a smile trying to break through his expression of dismay.

"Why won't she cheer for the swim meets?" he asked suddenly.

For a moment, Lenore's gentle smile faltered. She didn't know if she should tell what she knew. She had found out the information when in the school office one day: one of the school's two counselors had left a file open on one of the tables, and Lenore had happened to see a notation inside it, so she didn't know if it would be any kind of a breach of confidentiality to talk about what she had seen.

But then she decided: she had made no promise to keep the contents of the file secret. It had been an accident that she had found out. Besides, if revealing the information would keep Albert safe from future attacks, then it would be worth it.

"She's afraid of water," said Lenore. "Like, really afraid. She won't even get near a pool."

The smile that Lenore had seen fighting to emerge from Albert's expression was just millimeters away from seeing daylight now as he practically inhaled this wonderful bit of information as to his nemesis' Achilles heel.

But then, in the instant before the smile could emerge fully formed, like a butterfly from its chrysalis, Lenore's own expression changed from reassurance to horror, and she screamed as Albert's eyes started to bleed.

Only no, it wasn't blood. Instead it was some kind of viscous black fluid that was dripping now from his eyes, his nose, and had begun spurting from the boy's ears.

Lenore screamed again, backpedaling wildly, tripping over several nearby students and bringing all of them down in a heap.

Silence reigned in the quad as she regained her feet.

She slowly looked back at Albert, prepared to rush him to the school nurse, or perhaps even just to get him in her car and bundle him off to the small hospital in the next town.

What she saw stopped her heart.

She saw nothing. Albert was fine. No blood. No black ooze dribbling in spurts from ears and nose and eyes. Just a sad-faced boy with concern writ large in his eyes.

And then the worst thing Lenore could think of happened: Sarah West, bitch-cheerleader extraordinaire, had apparently come out onto the quad during the momentary fracas. She seized the moment: "Geez, Freakshow, you even frighten the teachers," she shouted.

The students all laughed, obviously scrambling to grab onto any excuse to break the uncomfortable silence.

Albert looked around at the laughing faces and pointing fingers, and Lenore could practically see the thoughts in his mind: his worst fears being realized as all his peers pointed and laughed at him. They were all against him.

He ran out of the quad, eyes awash in tears.

And Lenore, stunned at the fact that she had just seen a student hemorrhaging what looked like old motor oil and then just as suddenly return to normal, didn't do anything. She just watched him leave.

What's going on? she asked herself.

She didn't know the answer. But she thought of Sean Rand disappearing, and then of Albert's horrifying visage as he had...bled...and for the second time that day she pulled her sweater tightly around her shoulders even though the weather was warm.

What's going on in Rising?

***

SIX

***

Jason held his flashlight high so as to take in as much of his surroundings as he could. His flashlight was powerful but small, so that it created an almost laser-like beam that slashed through the darkness in thin slivers, illuminating only glimpses.

The glimpses were enough.

Blood was everywhere; he could immediately see what Hatty had meant when she had said there was "too much blood." Shelves were knocked down, and....

Jason knelt and felt at the floor of the basement. It was concrete, tough and unyielding. But in spite of the strength of the material, he saw what he could only describe as long furrows or gashes in the ground. As though...

(as though a monster's claws had gashed the place while gutting the boy)

...as though something had gone to town on the floor with some kind of chisel or something.

Jason pursed his lips. What could have caused this? he wondered.

Then he whipped around suddenly.

Had something moved behind him?

He cast his light around as he again sensed as much as saw something moving, something dark and dangerous. He was reminded of another dark time, another dark place, and could almost hear a gun cocking, could almost feel a man lining up a woman and her innocent son in his sights.

Jason turned again, soon finding himself spinning around, ever more disoriented and afraid.

There! He had heard it that time, he was sure of it! A gun cocking. Just like...

(just like that night)

...he had heard countless times at the Academy in Los Angeles, just like he heard all the time now when he practiced at the makeshift firing range he had created behind his own home.

Then the beam of his flashlight caught something. Something dark and small and round. Rolling along the floor toward him.

Jason stooped and picked the object up with trembling fingers.

A black crayon.

He flashed back to that night, that dreadful night, and once again...

Elizabeth's feet disappear into the darkness of the alley.

Jason is almost there. But too slow. Moving too slow.

Something rolls out of the alley: a single crayon. Black.

Complete silence, save only the sound of blood pumping in his ears.

He runs as though through syrup, cloying and nasty, pulling him one step back for every two steps that he takes.

He can hear his watch ticking. Slow. Everything is slow. Tick...tick...tick....

Then, at last, a pair of hard, fast sounds pierce the night: two gunshots.

Jason felt every fluid ounce of blood drain from his face in an instant; felt himself grow cold and weak and faint as his heart started pounding again at his ears. He shone his light all around, but he was alone.

Only him and the ghosts of the dead in this room, in this place, in this entry to Hell.

He left then, almost running out of the basement, sure when he reached the top that the door

(and the door was closed had he closed it he didn't remember closing it so what could have closed the damn thing)

would be locked to his touch; that he would have to stay and learn in the most horrifying fashion exactly what had taken Sean away.

But no. The door opened easily on well-maintained hinges, and Jason was through the door in an instant, fairly slamming it shut behind him in his hurry to get away.

It was only after he had been standing in the kitchen for several seconds that he realized he was still holding something tightly in his hand.

The crayon.

"Aaron?" he whispered.

The name of his dead son seeped into the still depths of the house, like the susurrations of dying leaves as they cast themselves from a tree that would sleep through the winter, leaving behind so much of itself in the process.

Nothing moved. All was silent, dark, deep.

Haunted.

A chill prickled at the back of Jason's neck as the word leapt into his mind unbidden. Haunted. Ghostly. The ghosts of the past were here.

He left the kitchen quickly, and for some reason he felt himself consciously avoiding looking at the microwave. Even though he had unplugged it, even though there was no way that it could hurt him, even so he did not want to look at it, convinced for a moment that if he did he would once again see those horrible, blurred green numbers.

Haunting him.

He went back into the entry, then went up the steps to the second floor. He was spooked, but he still had a job to do. Still had a boy

(no boy there was too much blood, far too much blood)

to find.

He went into the first room and could see at a glance that it was little Sean Rand's room. Bed shaped like a racecar, a pinboard with family pictures above a used desk that had clearly been inherited from his daddy, a chest of drawers. It all fairly screamed out to him of Sean's presence.

Jason poked through a few things, but found - as he had expected - very little. Only evidence that a truly nice kid had spent hours of happy time here. He moved to the desk and opened a drawer, then cried out in disgust as hundreds - no, thousands - of black, writhing cockroaches squirmed over and upon each other within the drawer. Jason felt himself propel backward, knocking into the bed and falling onto it with a small cry before managing to stand up again.

He could hear the cockroaches hissing. Did cockroaches hiss?

He reached out to slam the drawer shut, to trap the vile insects inside until he could come back with some gloves and find out what had attracted them to this place...then he stopped in mid-motion.

The roaches were gone.

But what was there - what had not been there before, he was sure of it - was equally disturbing.

He opened another drawer, and it had more of the same. Another drawer, and still more. Soon all the drawers in the room were open, and Jason felt something inside himself slide, as though he were a mountain and a part of him were sloughing away to plummet thousands of feet, never to be found again.

It can't be, he thought. Not here, not like this.

Every single drawer held the same thing. Thousands of them, all exactly the same, all bringing forth memories of a night - of the night - with their dark, burgeoning power.

Crayons. Thousands and thousands of black crayons. Just like the one that Aaron had dropped before....

Jason stared at the crayons all around him, unsure what they meant, unsure what to do. He actually pinched himself, hard enough to draw blood, to make sure he wasn't stuck in some insane dream; to make sure that he wasn't going to wake up and find himself still hunting in the woods.

He looked over then, and saw one more thing that chilled him to the bone.

A clock on the windowsill. Digital. A happy clock, Donald Duck with a clock inset in his belly. Normally this would be nothing but a fun though kitschy child's plaything. Three-fifteen in the afternoon and all's well.

But as Jason watched, the numbers shifted. Blurred, just like the microwave clock had done, the numbers suddenly disappearing in a faded swatch of gray on the LED screen. And again he heard Sean's mother, Amy-Lynn, saying "The clocks" in that gravelly voice from beyond.

A cloud moved over the sun outside.

Shadow draped the room in darkness.

Jason's breath caught in his throat. He stared at the clock for along moment. Then the cloud moved past the sun. Light returned to the room, and with it the clock returned to normal once again. Jason felt himself breathe once more.

At least, he breathed until he looked again at the desk. And this time the breath didn't catch in his throat, no this time it exploded out of him in an insane rush of air that left him instantly gasping. Gasping in the center of a room filled impossibly with darkness and black crayons and blurred clocks and there...on the desk...in a place where just a moment ago there had been nothing, there was now a piece of paper. Large and white.

The kind that children drew on in school.

Jason couldn't move for a moment. Then he did move. He grabbed the paper and crammed it in his pocket, then left. Fast.

The paper felt like it was burning him all the way down the stairs, charring a hole in his pants and then in his leg itself, searing its way through to his femur.

The paper was large and white. The kind that children drew on in school. And on it, in large, panicky letters written in black crayon, there were four words. Four words on a paper that Jason was damn sure had not been there only moments before. Four words that chilled him even as they burned:

I wiL be FiRSt.

***

SEVEN

***

Lenore drove slowly down the street. It was deserted, which was unusual for this time of day. Generally there would be kids playing, neighbors chatting.

Today, however, there was nothing. And she had the strange feeling that she was being watched; as though the silence that had enveloped the town hid within it some kind of watchful, angry presence. Something that resented the inhabitants of Rising; something that wanted the town for itself.

Still, Lenore continued looking.

Finally she saw what she had hoped she would: after hours of rolling up and down Rising's streets, over and over, she saw Albert, camcorder in hand, filming his feet as he walked dejectedly down the sidewalk.

She pulled up next to him and rolled down her window.

"Albert," she said.

His head jerked up to look at her. He looked afraid, as though he had not noticed the car pulling up beside him. Worse still, when he did see the car and who was driving it, the look of fear only intensified. He cringed as though about to be struck some serious blow, the look of someone who had been beaten down so many times that this was the only way he had left to react.

He saw her, and started running.

She got out of the car without thinking, pausing only to turn off the engine before running after him.

"Albert, wait!" she hollered.

"Why? So you can make me look stupid again?" he shouted back, not slackening his pace, rapidly drawing away from her.

Lenore tried to keep up, but was no match for the heavy but deceptively fast kid. He leapt over an ivy-laden fence, halting only an instant at the top to scream at her, "You're all out to get me!"

Then he was gone.

Lenore's shoulders drooped. She had wanted to explain; to tell him...

What? Sorry I shouted but
I saw your eyes start to bleed?

She turned and walked slowly back to her car. What could she have told him? And for that matter, what had caused that strange vision in the middle of the school?

A cloud fell across the sky. A storm was coming.

She walked by a house on the way back to her car and heard a chilling sound: the sound of a door shutting and a lock being thrown. In all her time in Rising, she could not remember ever hearing those sounds together before. Locks were something that out-of-towners used, not the people of this hamlet in the mountains. It was a measure of the fear that had fallen over the town, though, that people were actually trying to keep the monsters at bay with such basic methods as turning locks.

The wind blew for a moment, and Lenore could see stray wisps of fog curling down from the mountains, beginning the long crawl toward Rising. Soon, if they continued unabated, the fog would roll over the town, and all would be lost in the white darkness. Fog in Rising could reach otherworldly levels, making it all but impossible to move about, so thick that you could literally lose sight of your house - lights ablaze and all - within ten feet of exiting. It was never a death-sentence, as the fog usually came when the temperatures were fairly warm, so it wasn't as though getting lost would mean anything other than getting wet and uncomfortable until you could find your way to a friendly haven, but the fog was tremendously isolating and even frightening.

Not today, she found herself saying to herself in a kind of mystical mantra just short of prayer. Not today, not after the funeral. We don't need the fog.

But the low-hanging clouds that clung like nightmares to the mountains paid her no heed. They reached out tendrils of moisture and gradually started to writhe and roll into the town.

The wind whipped up again.

A storm was coming.

***

EIGHT

***

Jason strode back into his office, feeling an unusual mix of emotions. Fear, certainly, but also confusion and even an unsettling sense of the unreal, as though he had stepped out of Rising and into some mirror image of the town; one where nothing made sense and where the laws of nature no longer applied.

Where did all those damn roaches come from?

Hatty was typing at her desk in the reception area, and the old woman looked over her reading glasses at him as he entered. "Find anything we didn't expect?" she said as she handed him a stack of handwritten phone messages.

Jason looked at her. How was he supposed to answer that question?

Unable to come to a satisfactory way of responding, he chose not to, instead sidestepping the query by saying, "Hatty, could you dial me up the local FBI branch and connect me in the office?"

He went into his office without waiting for a reply. One thing was certain: whatever was happening in Rising, it was beyond him. He needed help, and the fact that there was a missing - though presumed dead - child would be enough cause for him to get it fairly quickly.

He sat down, glancing at the picture of Elizabeth and Aaron that sat in its customary spot, the only thing to detract from the Spartan, almost sterile, neatness of his desk. He looked at his phone. The extension light was not lit up, so Hatty clearly hadn't gotten through to the FBI field office yet.

Jason pulled two papers from his pockets. The first was the sheet that he had taken from Sean's classroom that morning. That thought brought thoughts of Lenore to mind, and he immediately blushed and glanced at the photo of his wife, fully expecting to see her frowning at him in the celluloid. But she still smiled.

He looked back at the paper. The page with no picture, but only four simple words on it:

I wiL be FiRSt.

Then he pulled out the other paper, the one that he had taken from where it had appeared out of thin air on Sean's desk in the little boy's room. Other than the fact that one had been carefully folded and the other was wrinkled and creased from being hurriedly shoved in Jason's pocket, the two were identical.

He felt something skitter over his hand then.

A roach.

Jason threw it from him with a shout, pushing away from his desk reflexively as the grotesque insect drew from him a visceral reaction of disgust and loathing. The roach flew off his hand, Jason's flailing propelling it through the air until it hit a wall and fell into the dark space between two filing cabinets. Jason could hear it scuttling about between the metal cases, its carapace bouncing off the cabinets as it hurried to the darkness that it called home.

Then it was silent. As quiet as though it had disappeared.

Maybe it has.

Jason watched the file cabinets intently for a long moment, more than half expecting a black crayon to come rolling out at him.

But nothing did.

The roach was silent.

The room was quiet.

The only noise was the noise in his heart, which was pumping at a furious pace. Thud-dud, thud-dud, thud-dud....

Then Jason jumped so hard it felt like his skeleton had fractured when the phone rang. He stabbed the speaker button and Hatty's voice came through. "FBI office on the line," she said.

He hit the speaker button again and then picked up the phone. And his heart sank. Instead of the strong voice of a young FBI agent in training, he heard a faraway whisper, interspersed with static. "This is...FBI field...e help you...."

Jason frowned. Perfect, he thought.

"Sorry," he said. "Can you say again?"

Again, the whisper came through. "We got...call about...."

Then the line cut off. There was no dial tone, even, only a strange, high-pitched hissing that hurt Jason's ears within a matter of seconds. He toggled the disconnect button a few times, but there was no improvement, so he hung up and resorted to the ultimate request for aid: "Hatty!"

The woman appeared at the doorway in an instant. "What's going on with the phone lines, again?" he asked.

Hatty frowned. "Don't know, exactly. They've been acting spotty all week. We can call places in town all right, but out of town calls are a problem."

Jason felt fear rise up in his gut, a feeling like ice and fire at the same time. Cold enough to burn, hot enough to freeze. He pushed it down, focusing on Hatty, and felt his fear ebb, morphing into anger. "Really?" he snapped. "Is there anything else I should know before I try to call someone who can actually help? Like, say, the
FBI?"

Hatty pursed her lips and squinted angrily, and suddenly his own rage dissipated, replaced by fear for the force of nature that was Hatty Reeves. "Don't you get smart with me, Sheriff," she snapped. "I slapped your ass when you were five for giving me lip and I'll do it again if you keep up that attitude."

Jason tried to keep his anger going, but knew it was misplaced; was worse than that, it was just plain wrong of him to be lashing out at someone who had tried to hold the town together for him in his absence.

"Sorry, Hatty, I just-" he began, but Hatty cut him off.

"Oh, I'm sorry, too, Sheriff. Everything's gone all wrong here, hasn't it?"

Jason put his head in his hands, feeling the dull throb of a headache beginning. "I've got to find him, Hatty," he said.

Hatty patted him on the hand, and he didn't have to see her face to tell she was as worried about him as anything else. "If anyone can, you will, Sheriff." Then she moved back to the doorway and said, "I'll try to get the FBI back on the horn."

"Don't worry about it, Hatty. I'll email them a report and that'll get through for sure. They'll have someone out here by tonight, I imagine."

"We could use the help, couldn't we?"

"Got that right."

Hatty nodded at him and then went back out the door, closing it softly behind her.

Jason turned to his computer, which Hatty had turned on for him at some point during the day. He clicked open the internet application, then clicked his "Favorites" file to bring up the "FBI - Office of Law Enforcement Coordination" website. He clicked a link, opening an email message, and began typing a lengthy email detailing the situation in Rising as far as he knew it. He glanced at the two crayon notes from time to time, but for the most part tried to remain focused on his task, attempting to make the email as concise and to-the-point as possible: he knew it didn't help the process any if the email was perceived as coming from some yokel out in the sticks.

Soon, he was almost finished, and was about to click "Send" when the computer suddenly hissed. There was a faint whiff of ozone.

"What the-" began Jason, and then a large spark leapt from the computer. The email flickered, unsent. "Oh, no, don't you dare!" he hollered.

A popup appeared: "Connection failure. No such domain."

"No such domain?! It's the flippin' FBI!" Jason pounded on the side of the computer, but to no avail: the email disappeared, replaced by a random swirling of dots and colors. Then the screen went completely dark.

But only for a moment.

In the next instant, the screen began flashing with different websites and images. Faster and faster, too fast to make much sense of, but then Jason began to notice: all the sites, all the images, all the videos that were coming through were about one thing.

Death.

Pictures of car-wrecks.

Images of fire, burning people.

Faster they came.

Streaming images of people falling to their death, leaping from a fiery high-rise.

A close-up of a leprosy victim.

Faster, faster.

Shots of a trauma ward, patients frozen in pain.

Faster.

And now it wasn't just images. Sounds started coming from the small computer speakers. Faraway screams, shrieks, and howls. The sounds of the doomed and dying.

Faster, faster.

Images of wars. Video of gunfire.

And now words began to flash between the images, broken letters that swirled around the edges of the computer screen in random patterns before coming together to form words.

Harappan.

Hoer-Verde.

Destruction, death, pictures of diseased limbs falling from bodies, cancerous sores on the faces of third-world mothers.

Chinese Army.

Roanoke.

Death, death, death.

Jason grabbed a felt-tip pen and wrote quickly, noting the strange words he had seen as quickly as he could, before they were lost to his memory. Harappan, Hoer-Verde, Chinese army, Roanoke.

And then the images and the words came too fast to see, a tumbling collage of horror and pain. Jason blinked, his eyes tearing, managing only with difficulty to look away from the computer screen, focusing on the one thing that could give him comfort after such a barrage of mayhem: the picture of his family.

But when he looked, there was no comfort to be had. He did not feel the familiar melancholy of love and sadness, did not feel even the familiar pain that usually gripped him when he thought of them.

Because they were gone.

The photo was still there, the background untouched. But his loved ones had been wiped away from the picture as though they never were. At first he thought it must be some kind of joke in extremely poor taste; that Hatty had somehow Photoshopped the picture. But he dismissed that idea in the same instant that it occurred to him: Hatty, though a woman of consummate skill in many areas, bordered on computer-illiterate. Besides, she would never do such a thing as this.

So what the hell happened to them?

He kept peering at the photo, as though by looking he could draw his family's image back into the frame; could save them from exile into nothingness as he had not saved them from the bullets of a sociopath.

Then something new caught his attention. The computer screen suddenly dissolved into random-pattern flickers of pixilated confusion. Jason tore his eyes from the hideous emptiness of the photo and stared at his computer screen, trying to find something else, something less horrifying than the specter of losing his family yet again, and this time in an even more disturbing way.

He leaned in as the computer picture utterly disintegrated. The screen was just a random mass of colors now, but even so, he thought he could almost make something out. As though there was something behind the meaningless mass of confusion, something struggling to come out; to be born.

He leaned in even closer, almost touching the screen with his nose. Then gasped suddenly as, through the computerized haze, he saw something. It was something completely unforeseen, something that penetrated him to the depths of his soul. Something that could not be, but somehow was.

"Elizabeth?" he whispered.

It was his wife's face, mouth open in a silent scream of pain and terror.

***

NINE

***

The image on his computer screen changed a moment later. It was still, impossibly, his wife, but now she was not screaming that horrible, blood-curdling silent scream. Now her lips were moving, as though she were trying to say something. He couldn't hear it, though, just as he hadn't heard her on the night she was killed...not until it was too late, anyway. He strained to make it out, to read her lips through the flickering pixels that threatened to crowd her face off the screen at any moment.

Then the door to his office flung open with a bang. He looked over and saw Hatty, looking perturbed, then looked back almost instantly at the screen. But it was too late. There was nothing there. The screen was blank.

He looked at the photo on his desk, and was relieved to see it was back to normal as well, his dead family smiling back at him once again as though all was well.

"Ox is out here again," said Hatty.

Jason almost didn't hear her. He was staring at the computer, as though trying to call his wife's image back by force of will, as though by staring he could re-impose the insanity that had somehow fallen over the office during the last minutes.

The computer blinked once, and Jason hoped that his wife's image would return. But no. The screen went dark. Silent.

Dead.

"You're kidding," he said.

"I know," responded Hatty, mistaking the object of his anger. "But you know Ox."

"What?" said Jason. Then he realized what Hatty had been saying and felt anger well up within him once more. George "Ox" Mackey was a good guy, the owner of Rising's general store. But he also had a debilitating fear that had him in Jason's office once a week or more, asking for help. "If you're going to tell me that Ox wants me to get something off his roof..." he began.

"He's afraid of heights, Sheriff. You know that."

"Get rid of him, Hatty," said Jason, and returned to his computer. Still dark.

He stared at the notes he had taken as words flashed on the screen. "Harappan," "Roanoke," "Hoer-Verde," "Chinese army."

"Sheriff," Hatty was saying. "All he needs is-"

"For Heaven's sake, Hatty, he's a grown man and I don't have time to cater to his fear of heights, so please for the love of God get rid of him."

He saw Hatty glance out into the reception area, and caught a glimpse of Ox. The man was aptly named. In his late forties, the man was incredibly powerful of build, and easily seven feet tall to boot. Built like a brick wall that ran away to join a street gang, but his face was kind, and his large eyes were now glistening with concern and worry.

Hatty stared at the big frightened man, then motioned to him to hold on a second before swinging the door shut. Jason barely noticed the movements, still engrossed in the computer's dark screen.

"Sheriff," said Hatty after a moment. "I know you're busy, and I know you're taking this all real personal."

"Hatty-"

"Shut it, Junior!" snapped the older woman, and Jason felt himself obey her reflexively, a habit born of the fact that he - like just about every other middle-aged man and woman in Rising - had at one time been a student in Hatty's elementary school days. Then, as now, Hatty had not been a force to be trifled with.

"Good," she said, nodding approvingly at his instant silence. "Now you listen up, Sheriff, because I'm only saying this once. Everyone here is afraid. The little boy disappearing the way he did has us all on edge. But he's gone, and he's probably dead. And the rest of the people in this town are more afraid than they usually are. Which means they're going to grasp at any straw they can to feel like someone's protecting them. And that's you." Hatty leaned in on Jason's desk, bringing the entirety of her forceful person to bear. "So you take a break from your investigating. Show the town you're here, and that they don't have to be so afraid. And go down to the corner store and help Ox get whatever is on his roof off of it. You're the Sheriff." She paused a moment, then in a quieter voice finished, "You're all we've got right now."

Jason stared at the meaningless words that he had noted for another second. At the dark computer screen. At Sean Rand's writing:

I wiL be FiRSt.

Then he nodded. "You're right, Hatty. This thing has me in knots."

She smiled then, for all the world looking like Jason was her favorite student once more, and had just treated her to a better answer than usual. "I know you're worried, Sheriff. And that's why we love you. But because we all love you, we need you to be here for us. All of us...not just the ones that are gone."

Jason nodded. He stood and went to the door, then stopped with his hand on the knob. "'More afraid than they usually are'?" he said.

"What was that, Sheriff?"

"You said people are more afraid than they 'usually' are." He swung back to stare at her. "I thought the whole point of living in a town like this one is that 'usually' no one is afraid."

Hatty snorted. "Small towns are all about fear, Sheriff. Either fear of leaving, or fear of whatever made you run here in the first place."

"And Ox is afraid of heights." Jason smiled impishly, unable to resist jabbing at his old teacher a bit. "And what are you afraid of, Miss Hatty?"

The old woman laughed, almost a cackle in the gloaming. "Just the dark, I guess. And my ever-more-saggy boobs."

Jason chuckled as well, then opened the door to go help Ox. Before he could leave, however, Hatty said, "Sheriff?" and he swung back to face her once more. "What were you working on?"

"My computer started to act...weird...and...." His voice drifted off. Hatty was holding up the papers on which he had taken notes when strange words started flashing on the computer. He could remember taking the notes clearly, though the words themselves were already fading from his memory.

But even though the words were fading, he knew he had written them. In spite of that fact, however, somehow the words he had written were all gone now. Instead, his page of notes had been replaced by a page on which only two words were written, over and over, in a dark, familiar scrawl:

wE'RE NeXt

Black crayon.

Jason couldn't even speak, utterly dumbfounded at the fear that clutched him in icy gauntlets as he looked at the words. "Sheriff?" Hatty said again, clearly trying to get through to him. When he didn't respond to a direct inquiry, she apparently decided to shift tactics, and said, "Well, never you mind telling me. Just go help Ox."

Jason nodded shakily and turned to go. Then he heard Hatty's parting words: "And let's hope his problems don't end up being just the first crack in the dam."

He felt himself jerk as though being shot, remembering the other words on Sean's papers, the drawings of the little Dutch boy.

Stunned, he left without another word.

And a moment later, he heard a click: Hatty turning on the light.

Scared of the dark.

***

Lenore pulled into the driveway of her small house on the outskirts of town. She looked at it, as she always did before entering. She did not pull into the carport: there were too many hiding places there, too many man-sized shadows that could hide...

(his breath on her, his hands on her, oh, God, his hands)

...anything.

She got out of the car, holding tight to the mace on her keychain, and went carefully to the door. Beside it was a sophisticated security keypad, one that she had had to special order from a store in Seattle. The shipping alone had cost almost a week's salary.

And it had been worth it.

The LED screen on the keypad glowed green, and Lenore took one last look around to make sure there was no one nearby before she switched her grip from mace to keys and unlocked the door.

Inside the house she immediately went to a second security keypad. Same make, but different model, different code than the first one. She typed in the second code, and the LED blinked: "Scanning. No intrusions detected."

Only after receiving this hopeful missive did Lenore move to close the door. She locked it, then secured it by pulling closed each of the three heavy duty deadbolts that she had installed herself the same week she moved in.

She allowed herself a second to relax, but only a second. Then she went from room to room in the small abode, turning on all the lights as she went, once more holding the mace in front of her as she ritualistically checked each room, each closet, even under the sinks. The windows she did not check: they were permanently closed, covered on the outside with cast-iron grating and sealed from the inside.

Finally, the house ablaze in comforting light, Lenore allowed herself to relax. She was back at the front door again, having made her customary circuit that brought her back to the security system for one more check. Still no intrusions detected.

Still alone.

And then she heard a noise.

It was large, a large sound, if that were possible. A sound as of someone scuffling from one room to another in the back of the house.

Lenore felt a chill come over her.

No intrusions.

Windows sealed.

House empty.

But she was not alone.

***

TEN

***

It was dark and getting darker. White tendrils of thick mist curled down from the mountains, licking hungrily at the edges of town as they made their way steadily inward, ever closer to the center of town.

Jason stood in front of the general store. It was quaint: children’s' ads for lemonade and puppies for sale in the storefront windows; another poster board that loudly proclaimed an upcoming children's rodeo.

Ox stood beside Jason, the large man gulping as he stared at the ladder that stood below the eaves of his store.

"Sorry, Sheriff," said Ox. "Whatever's there, I think it may be knocking into my antenna. I tried to call the Fire Department, but Randy's busy."

Jason sighed, and saw that Ox had noticed the movement. He saw embarrassment surge almost visibly through the huge man. "Sorry, Sheriff," said Ox again.

"No, it's not you, Ox," Jason hastened to reassure him. "Just the fact that we have a one-man 'Fire Department' and he's always hiding from his 'fire dog' who I'm pretty sure hates him at best and has rabies at worst."

Ox shrugged, half-smiling at the ridiculousness of it. Jason sighed again, and began to climb. He left Ox behind him as he clambered up to the roof. "You be careful, Sheriff," shouted Ox, looking terror stricken as though it were he and not the sheriff who was up on the rooftop.

Jason waved at Ox to show he would take appropriate care, then cast about for the antenna. He saw it almost instantly: the old-fashioned kind of antenna that looked like a metal skeleton against the fog-ridden backdrop of the dark sky. The tips of the antenna waved back and forth gently, though Jason could feel no breeze, and he concluded that something must be hitting it at the base. What that might be, however, he could not tell: his view of the antenna cut off at the apex of the roof, which was between him and the point at which the antenna entered the building.

Jason sighed again, then climbed further up the roof. Might as well do it right, he thought.

"You okay, Sheriff?" came Ox's voice.

Jason didn't answer, just kept climbing. He looked over the peak of the roof...and almost fell off as he felt himself go suddenly woozy and nauseous at the sight of what was moving the antenna.

Jason blinked quickly. It couldn't be. Not this. What he was seeing was impossible. Frightening, disquieting...impossible.

Sean Rand was holding onto the antenna, shaking it gently. The boy's eyes were the milky white cataracts of the dead, his skin was mostly white, though it shone with a deep, ugly purple around the bloodless red wounds that scarred him from toe to crown, as though he had died at the claws of a cougar or some other vicious cat.

Or something worse.

The little boy smiled, and Jason's vision grew even darker as he saw that most of the boy's teeth were splintered or missing: torn apart by the hideous violence that had been the source of his demise.

Jason shouted in terror at the impossible sight that he was faced with. He stumbled on a loose shingle, and felt the thing peel off under his feet. He pitched forward, toward the heinous vision that was Sean Rand, the little boy's arms now open wide as though for a welcoming embrace. Then he pushed backward, trying desperately to overcome his own inertia and avoid that hideous grasp. The result was an awkward pitch to the side that almost had him falling headfirst over the side of the roof before he finally managed to arrest his momentum and stop the headlong flight into nothing. He stopped at the last second, coming to rest on his belly, his head hanging over the eaves and staring face to face at Ox below him.

The big man looked like he was about to pass out with sympathetic fear. "Watch out," said Ox. "Heights."

Jason didn't answer, but instead scrambled back up over the roof, over the top, back to the antenna.

And saw a dead badger. It was huge, curled around the base of the antenna, pushing it askew with its dead weight.

But no sign of little Sean Rand.

Jason looked around, as though he could possibly find something that would make any sense out of what had just happened.

The mountains stared down at him. The mist was coming toward him.

And answers were nowhere to be found.

***

A moment later Jason heard Ox's shout as he pitched the dead badger down, narrowly missing the big man. Jason followed the carcass down, crawling back onto the ladder and then reaching ground only a moment later. Both he and Ox looked at the dead badger for a long moment before Ox finally managed, "You okay, Sheriff?"

Sure, thought Jason. I think I just found little Sean, and it turns out he's a ghost who looks like he's been the main cut at the butcher's shop, but other than that I'm hunky-dory.

"I'm fine," was all he said aloud.

Ox prodded at the dead badger with a size nineteen foot. "Thanks, Sheriff. I owe you."

"No problem, Ox, just don't-"

Jason was interrupted by a truck that screeched to a stop in front of the store. It was an old truck, worn and torn with use, but well cared for beneath its surface appearance. Out of the truck stepped Harold "Jonesy" Jones, one of the town's most prolific hunters when in season and one of the town's only plumbers the rest of the year 'round.

The man was toting a shotgun.

Jason nodded at the man, who was dressed in a flannel shirt, thick denim jacket, and heavy-duty camouflage pants. "Hey, Jonesy. Night hunting?"

Jonesy nodded. "Hey, Sheriff; Ox. Yeah, I thought I'd skip town for a little while." Turning to Ox, he said, "Can I grab some shot?"

Ox nodded and started to take down the ladder that Jason had used to scale the store's roof. "You know where I keep it."

On a whim, Jason followed Jonesy into the general store. The place was as quaint on the inside as it was outside. One corner of the store was dominated by a real soda fountain with bar seating, the rest of the place held everything from animal seed to sugar to cereal to a few dresses: Rising's answer to Wal-Mart.

Jonesy went behind the front counter to an ammo display and started looking through the boxes for his caliber. "How was your hunt?" Jonesy asked Jason. "Bag anything?"

Jason hesitated, thinking of the deer he had shot, and then thinking of the empty truck bed with its bloody coiled ropes that held nothing. "Not sure," he said. Then, before the hunter could ask about his cryptic answer, Jason said, "What did you mean out there, Jonesy?"

"Huh?" said the other man, still looking for the right kind of shot.

"About skipping town...what did you mean by that?"

"Just wanted to get out for a while," answered Jonesy.

"Why?"

Something in Jason's voice must have signaled to the hunter that this was more than just passing conversation, for he stopped his ammunition search and looked the sheriff in the eye. "You've seen it, Sheriff Meeks," said Jonesy. "Everyone's afraid. The whole town. More afraid than-"

"- than they usually are," finished Jason, remembering Hatty's words back at his office.

Jonesy nodded sagely and murmured a quick, "Just so," before going back to his search. "I figured I'd get out of town. Go up to the mountains where the only thing I have to worry about is a rogue dear impaling me or something." The hunter laughed as he said that last, but the laugh was dry of humor, the kind of laugh a child might utter on a dark night when it is trying desperately to stave off fear.

Jonesy found the right box of shot then, and pocketed it after dropping several bills and a handful of change on the front counter. Jason followed the hunter back outside, then watched Jonesy drive off in his heavy pickup truck.

"Did he leave exact change?" asked Ox. Jason nodded. "Jonesy's like clockwork," said the huge man.

"He's a pro all right," agreed Jason. "No one better than-" then he cut off suddenly.

"What is it?" asked Ox.

Jason pointed at the storefront. "What's that?" he asked in a hushed voice.

Ox glanced to where the sheriff was pointing. "Oh, you know as well as me," he said, then opened the front door to take the ladder back inside. "Kids come here, they put up their little ads for dogs for sale or lawnmowing or little jobs they'll do or-"

"No," said Jason. He stopped Ox, pointing him directly at one of the signs. "That one," he reiterated.

Ox squinted at the sign, which was tucked next to a child's poster announcing free bunnies. The sign was small, wrinkled...and Jason was quite sure that it hadn't been there just a moment ago.

"Don't know," said Ox. "Wasn't there last time I checked."

Jason touched the paper, half-expecting not to be able to feel anything. But he could. It was real; he could feel the crinkle of the white paper and the waxy feel of the crayon writing that was the only decoration on the paper. Dark, childish writing. A single, short message:

cRak IN tHe DAm.

***

ELEVEN

***

Jason slammed into his office, moving quickly to his Rolodex, flipping through the cards until he found the one marked "FBI." He picked up the phone, and grimaced as he heard the dial tone. Staticky, whispery, it sounded like the pale echo of a real dial tone, as though he had stepped out of reality and into a nearby dimension that only lightly touched upon the normality he had come to expect in his everyday life.

Jason dialed the number on his Rolodex card. The line rang a few times, then picked up. His stomach sank as he heard the voice. It was barely discernable through the static that all but obscured the words being spoken at the other end of the line. "FBI...office...may...-elp...you...."

"Hello?" said Jason.

"...an't...you..."

The static on the line spiked, completely overpowering the thin voice of the FBI field office person, and then thinned out. When the static lessened, however, there was no longer any hint of a human voice on the other end of the line. Silence reigned for a moment. And then something else came on the line: a high-pitched whine, so low in volume as to be barely discernible, but undeniably there for all that. The sound was familiar to him somehow, as though Jason had heard it in another life, or the dream of another life. It chilled him like a shadow across the winter sun, drawing a cold cloth over his soul and making him shiver.

Then the hissing stopped. The line cut out. Dead. Jason toggled the disconnect switch on the receiver a few times, but knew before he did it that he would have no success in coaxing the phone into working. Then he noticed something.

The computer. It was back on. And just as he noticed it, he caught something moving across the screen. Just the barest glimpse before it was gone, but it was enough. Enough to be sure that he had seen it. Enough to wish that he hadn't.

It was Aaron. His boy's mouth was open in that same silent scream that his wife had worn when he had seen her image in the screen. But his son was gone in just an instant, and once again the computer flared and went dark.

At the same instant, the lights in his office went out, leaving him in a black room, his only illumination the dim moonlight that had managed to penetrate the fog that had invaded Rising in the last few hours. The light was cold and lifeless, the pale shading of a corpse.

The phone rang a moment later. It was Hatty. And her voice was, thank goodness, strong and clear, the line easily audible. "You better get here," she said without preamble. As she said it, a crash sounded on the line, as though someone had dropped an armful of glassware onto a tile floor.

"Hatty? Where are you?" said Jason. "What-" And that was when the screaming began.

"I'm at Doc Peabody's!" shouted Hatty. Behind her voice, the screams could still be heard clearly, a thunderous shouting that rivaled anything Jason had ever heard before in terms of sheer power and volume. "You better come quick!"

"What is it?" shouted Jason. "What's going on?"

At that moment, his computer screen flared. A single word appeared: "Hoer-Verde."

"It's the boy's mother," responded Hatty, sounding as though she were struggling with something - or someone. "It's Sean's mother."

In the background of the phone call, Jason could hear a sudden, awful, almost inhuman scream of pain and terror. Then he heard Amy-Lynn's voice, grown awful and deep: the voice from beyond Hell. "It's here!" she shrieked, her voice gravelly and shredded. "The monster is here!"

The computer continued to flare as the woman spoke, the single word appearing over and over again.

Hoer-Verde.

Hoer-Verde.

Hoer-Verde. Hoer-Verde. Hoer-Verde. Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde....

***

Jason pulled into the quaint two-story house that was both Doc Peabody's residence and his medical offices and was out of the truck and through the front door almost in a single movement. The sound of Amy-Lynn's scream resounded in his mind, and he couldn't shake the idea that every second lost meant a second closer to...

(death)

...something truly awful. Something for which he had no words.

He rushed into the front office area. It was deserted. Completely, spookily silent. "Doc?" he shouted. "Hatty?"

"In here," came Doc's voice from nearby. Jason went through a sliding door and into a small, convivially-furnished waiting room. Modern art graced the walls right next to pictures of Donald and Goofy, Mickey and Bugs; and newspapers like Modern Housekeeping took their places beside Teen Beat and a host of other periodicals where just about any patient of any age could find something of interest.

Hatty and Doc were sitting beside one another on a couch in the waiting room, looking at the closed door to Doc's examination room. Jason glanced at the door. All was still. Tomb silent.

"She calm down?" he asked with a hopeful smile. When neither Hatty nor Doc moved to answer, he said, "Guys?"

"She stopped screaming," whispered the doctor at last, after far too long a pause had elapsed for Jason's comfort.

"That's great," said the sheriff. "That's good, right?" Another long moment, then, "Right?"

Doc looked directly at Jason for the first time, and Jason was dismayed to see how the man looked: his eyes were bloodshot, his entire demeanor that of someone who has been broken in some small but critical fashion, whose world had suddenly and irrevocably taken a step to one side and would never return to its "normal" state ever again. "You don't understand," said Doc Peabody. "She shouldn't have ever started screaming. Not with the amount of tranquilizer in her."

Jason fought down the urge to shiver, knowing that the room was warm enough and also knowing that any outward display of fear was likely to slow down the process of getting to the bottom of what was going on here.

Jason looked pointedly at the closed door to the exam room. "She in there?"

Hatty and Doc nodded, their heads moving in unison to the point that Jason had an insane urge to check the couch to see if they'd been wired to respond to the same remote control. "How is she?" he asked instead.

"Don't know," said Hatty.

"She was asleep, tranquilized, when she woke up and started screaming. I tried to get to her, but before I could get into the examination room, she just barricaded herself in there," said Doc. "We couldn't get to her. And then she just went...." The old man looked at his hands.

"...Silent," finished Hatty for him.

Doc nodded. "As death," he added.

Jason went to the door. He rapped quietly on it with his knuckles. "Amy-Lynn?" he said through the door. "It's Sheriff Meeks. You okay?" No answer. Another quick rat-tat with the knuckles, an empty, dull sound that made Jason feel as though it were he being hit, a sturdy fist punching into him, knocking the air out of him, making it hard to breathe....

"Amy-Lynn?" he tried again.

Still no answer.

He grabbed the doorknob. It turned, but when he tried to push the door open, there was no give. He grunted as he threw his shoulder into the door. Was it his imagination, or had the door given just a centimeter or two? He drew back and hit the door again.

Slam. Slam. Slam.

Each time, the door opened a quarter-inch, then a half-inch, then an inch at a time. Soon he had the door open far enough that he could make out what was blocking his entrance: looked like Amy-Lynn had picked up every bit of furniture, medical equipment, and anything else not bolted to the floor, and used it to create a makeshift blockade, a fortification clearly built with one purpose in mind: to keep anything and everything out of that room.

"Amy-Lynn?" he called. No use getting a scalpel in the noggin for surprising her, he thought. "Amy-Lynn, it's Sheriff Meeks. I'm coming in. You're safe, I promise." He waited a moment, then grasped the doorjamb for leverage, fighting his way further into the room.

He pushed and strained, then with one final grunt and the crash and clatter of falling medical equipment, he was at last standing in a wide open door.

He took half a step, then stopped and stared, unmoving.

Hatty and Doc came up behind him a moment later, and he could tell from the collective gasps he heard that they were as dumbfounded at what he was seeing as he was.

"Impossible," whispered Doc.

The room - a windowless place with only one way in and one way out - was empty. Someone had barricaded themselves from the inside of a room with no other egress.

And subsequently disappeared.

Then Jason noticed something even more disquieting: a digital clock on the wall. It was blurred, just like the one on the Rands' microwave; just like the one in little Sean Rand's bedroom.

"The clocks," whispered Jason. "The dark. And you're all alone."

Hatty shivered and looked around, then Jason heard her shriek and spun to face her. "What, Hatty?" he snapped, concern for his old teacher almost overpowering him in an instant.

Hatty pointed to her left, down the dark hall that lay beyond the waiting and exam rooms. "What did you see?" Jason asked again.

Hatty could barely speak, her voice sounding cracked and unsure. But at last she managed to get out the words. "I think...I think it was the boy, Sheriff. I think it was little Sean."

A moment later Jason was walking through the house, room to room, his Beretta in one hand, his flashlight in the other. He flicked on lights as he went from place to place, Doc and Hatty staying a few steps behind him at all times, both looking ready to bolt as rabbits in the fox coop.

Top to bottom, bottom to top. No Sean, no Amy-Lynn.

The last place he looked was back in the exam room once again. He looked at the impossibly empty room with the blurred clock, and the words came unbidden to his mind:

"The dark. The clocks. Time slows down. And you're all alone."

Sean Rand was gone. And now Amy-Lynn had disappeared as literally and completely as a magician's assistant.

Who would be next?

***

TWELVE

***

The lights of the football field still blaze, but it is a cold light.

No warmth for the denizens of Rising.

All around town, doors are locked, windows are latched.

Townsfolk draw drapes - dusty with lack of use - over their windows, shutting out the presence that more and more of them are starting to feel as the mist rolls over their houses and consumes them in its unnatural whiteness.

No one wants to know what may be happening to them.

People sit down to late dinners, but can't eat.

They turn on the television, but reception is fuzzy.

Many of them are at desks or tables. Writing feverishly.

Outside, the mist has finished dripping off the mountains and is now oozing its way down the individual lanes and country roads that demark the boundaries of Rising.

Wherever it goes, the mist swallows the light.

A thing alive.

The more the mist envelopes the town, the faster the people write, the more hurried and frightened their penmanship.

Things are just getting started, each person knows in his or her heart.

Just getting started.

And about to get truly bad.

***

THIRTEEN

***

The lights from the high school stadium, which were a royal pain if you lived anywhere in a two-mile radius of the place and wanted to get a little sleep, were now the main source of illumination in Rising's dark streets. Jason used the light to carefully throw a pile of files on the seat of his truck, then looked at Hatty, who was getting ready to call it a night as well.

"Late night," said Jason, nodding at the football lights.

"Cheerleading practice," answered Hatty. Checking her watch, she added, "Should be through in a few hours." Then she shivered, and Jason could tell that she was still rattled from their experience at Doc Peabody's.

"You going to be all right?" he asked.

"What's going on here, Sheriff?" she asked by way of an answer.

"I don't know," said Jason truthfully. Then he glanced at the numerous files on his seat. "But I'm going to find out."

Hatty got in her car. "I hope you do, Sheriff. But any answer you find...I doubt you'll get it from your case files."

Jason didn't want to share with her his own silent conviction of the same idea as true, so instead said merely, "We do what we can."

Hatty nodded and drove off. Once she was gone, he looked at the files again and sighed, allowing the hopelessness he felt to show for a brief moment. Then he got in his truck and made the short drive to his home.

His house was one of the small places just outside of Rising, at the base of the mountains that always loomed over the town. His back yard consisted of forest that went as far as he could see and beyond: government land that, as far as he could tell, was never going to be developed beyond carving out a dirt road or two for the convenience of the Bureau of Land Management surveyors that came out his way every three or four months to map some portion of the area before returning to whatever government office had spawned them in the first place.

He pulled into his garage, closing the door behind him, and then went into his house.

His house was nothing special, just a basic place that he had purchased when he moved back to Rising. A few bedrooms, one and a half baths, an office, a den. More than what he needed for himself, but not so big that it felt like he should have his family living there, thank God.

Jason threw the files he had brought with him from the station onto a TV tray that sat by a recliner, and sat down. Soon he had the files open all over his lap, trying to find something in them that might lend a clue about what was happening in his town. He took notes as he worked, and every once in a while checked the notes to make sure that they still were what he had written, and hadn't changed into childish scrawl of nonsense words.

Harappan. Hoer-Verde.

His thoughts kept drifting to the words, and more and more it felt like they were some kind of a message. But what kind of message he could not even guess at.

Jason sipped a cola, rubbed his eyes...and froze.

A shadowed form stood in the hallway. The person was cloaked in darkness; no features could be seen.

But it was a child.

"Aaron?" Jason whispered, then shook his head. Not Aaron, it couldn't be his son, Aaron was dead and buried and gone forever. "Sean?" he said louder. "Sean Rand?"

The figure didn't move, either to flee or to approach and walk into the pale ring of light that Jason's reading lamp cast. Jason gulped dryly, hoping against hope that this could somehow be the missing boy; could be the thing that Rising needed to set it right again.

"Sean?" he said again, and began slowly moving files off his lap so he could move quickly.

The figure moved, walking - still utterly hidden - into the kitchen.

"Hey, wait," Jason shouted, and quickly followed. But by the time he got to the kitchen it was empty, the side door that led outside swinging shut with a low thud. He ran out after the child, and found himself in forest in only a few feet. His house was on the outskirts of town, well apart from any neighbors. The mist that was still making inroads on the town below had arrived here in full force, laying on the ground like an impenetrable blanket, writhing around his feet and legs like some alien being trying to slowly make its way to his face, where it could suffocate and eat him.

The town looked darker than usual from his vantage point, though the football lights that attested to continuing cheerleading practice were easily visible, like banners above the mists.

"Sean!" shouted Jason.

A twig snapped in the trees, and he barreled off in that direction, only registering in the tiniest part of his mind that he had no gun; that he had left his service pistol behind in the house. He ran into the forest unthinkingly, his only thought the idea that if he could save Sean, even at this late period, that he could save the town, could reverse whatever strangeness had come to the sleepy town and make everything as it once was.

In the forest, the mist clung to the trees like a disease, rolling in thicker and thicker all the time. Soon, Jason could barely see one tree from the next. All was shadow and dim white mist. Shadows flitted all around him, moving at the corners of his vision, disorienting him constantly. He felt like he was in the middle of a ghosts' ball, the only living - and therefore uninvited - person to stumble onto the place of their partying.

"Sean!" he cried again, and spun around, feeling disorientation rise up within him and begin to take control of his normally tightly reined feelings. He couldn't see anything now. Not the football field, not Rising, not his own house, not even a single damned tree.

Then there was a flash of black in the corner of his vision. Jason swiveled to face it; followed it. The shape flitted ahead of him, always moving, always just ahead, like the lingering edges of a nightmare better left forgotten.

Then, at last, the shadow stopped. Jason caught up to it.

And felt himself begin to breathe again, though he was not aware of the exact moment he had stopped.

It was Sean!

The little boy stood in bright blue pajamas, slump-shouldered, his back to Jason so that his face was not visible. That was disturbing, but Jason pushed away any negative feelings. Here was the boy that could put things back together at Rising, he felt sure of it.

"Sean?" he said again. "It's just me. Sheriff Meeks."

He reached out to touch the boy. The figure shrunk away from his fingers, keeping its back turned at the same time.

"Don't," said Sean.

Jason's hand stopped in midmotion. A long, eerie moment passed.

Then the boy spoke again. This time, however, his voice was different. Bubbling. Like he was speaking the words through a throat that had been viciously torn out.

Like he was speaking words around blood.

"It got me," said the boy.

"What got you?"

Another long moment. Then: "It got me."

"Let me help you," pleaded Jason.

"You can't. No one can."

And the boy began to turn....

"Because it's started," he said, and completed his turn. "Fear."

Jason screamed. The face had been torn and destroyed by something out of this world, something for which he had no name. He was taken by a primal panic, a fear that went back to the days when people huddled in caves during thunderstorms and prayed for the gods to stop throwing fire at them. He stumbled backward, seized by an irresistible need to flee, to escape, to fly away from this place and this horrible specter that confronted him.

Then he tripped, his boots slipping in the thick mud, and when he looked up, the boy was gone.

Now, instead of Sean, a woman and a young boy stood in front of him.

"Oh, God, please, no," he whispered.

It was Elizabeth and Aaron, dressed as they were in the picture on his desk; as they had been dressed on that day, that fateful and horrible day of days when everything changed.

Jason looked around, and saw that the forest was gone; disappeared. In its place, he was now standing on a city street. One that seemed familiar. He heard a tinkling laugh, and turned in time to see....

His wife and son were disappearing around a nearby corner, laughing and practically dancing with joy as they ran from him. "Hide from Daddy!"

They turned the corner. "NO!" screamed Jason, a shout that came from deep in his gut and took every ounce of his strength and converted it to sound. "NO!" But neither of his loved ones heard. He ran after them.

And as it always did, time...

...slowed...

...down.

He couldn't get there fast enough.

A black crayon rolled out of a blacker alley. Black from black, evil from evil.

Two shots rang out...

And Jason jerked awake with a scream!

He looked around.

He was back in his house. Still in his recliner chair, files still spread out over his lap.

The TV was on, but there was no reception; only snow played on the tube. Jason rubbed at his eyes. He must have fallen asleep for a moment.

He had fallen asleep - had had The Dream - while working on the files that pertained to Sean's disappearance, so small wonder he had jumped right into a dream like the one he had had.

Then he froze as he realized something. His hands. They were not the clean hands of a fastidious county Sheriff.

They were dirty. Grubby. Mud under the nails. As though he had fallen down.

He looked at his pants. The knees were stained with mud as well.

Then the case files on his lap drew his attention. On top of them was a now familiar piece of white paper. Black crayon writing in thick letters. This time, however, there was no cryptic message about a crack in a dam or about being next. The message was short, and to the point.

iT'S sTarTED

***

FOURTEEN

***

Jason looked out a nearby window, casting about for anything that would take his mind off the horrifying appearance of this newest - message? threat? - whatever it was from beyond.

Outside, the mist was so thick that he could barely see anything. Just a few shadows. Maybe they were houses in the distance, maybe they were just nearby trees.

And maybe they were other, less harmless things.

That last thought came unbidden into his mind, and he tried to laugh it off and cast it out without another thought. But he couldn't. It was a real concern. And a moment later he could see why he had such a concern in the first place.

Because some of the shadows seemed to be moving.

He went slowly to his front door and opened it.

The mist was a blanket. Thick, impenetrable, unworldly. He couldn't see ten feet away, so thick was the sudden fog that had descended like a veil meant to cut him off from the town and from memory itself.

The fog was so thick that it was itself frightening.

But as dark and thick as it was, Jason could still see them. Could still see the...things that were moving about in its depths.

Whatever they were, he got the distinct impression that they were not friendly.

***

Throughout Rising the mist penetrated each yard, each house. People's televisions blinked on and off and then dissolved into snow as the fog came, as though it were an electrical storm that had somehow compromised the integrity of the electronics. People tried to call one another, but the phones were not working and the isolation they felt was only amplified by their failed attempts to reach others.

On the football field, the cheerleaders broke up their practice early, rushing for their cars at a hurried pace, looking back into the fog that seemed to leer at them like a living beast.

Sarah, the head cheerleader and nemesis of the unfortunate Albert, looked into the mist herself and shivered. She had no ride, her home was close enough to the city center that her family expected her to walk to and from school. Because after all, what could go wrong in Rising?

Throughout the town, the mist invaded. Televisions turned off, radios lost their reception. People came out of their houses, looking into the mist. In some cases they were as little as five or six feet from one another, but could not tell, so thick was the preternatural mist that surrounded and isolated them one from another. They couldn't see each other; couldn't see much of anything.

Many of the people of Rising were holding notes in their hands: notes that they had inexplicably found themselves writing during dinner, or instead of helping the baby down for bed, or even in the middle of sex. Notes that they had no control over, but had felt constrained to write, as though for a time they were mere marionettes on a joint string.

Some of the notes were direct, and simple, and Jason would have shivered to see them: "iT'S sTarTED" in black crayon.

Other notes bore a single word, a word that the people could all agree they felt, but none had any idea how to avoid or change: "FeAR."

Then a wind whipped up, blowing tattered bits of the fog at people's faces as though the mist were reaching out tentacles to grab them and make them its own.

Shapes could be glimpsed in the mist: ghostlike wraiths that flitted quickly in and out of view, moving too fast to be seen directly. Dark, forbidding.

Traces of hornlike shadow could be seen on the heads of some of the apparitions, and more than one of Rising's residents crossed themselves and knew that the Devil had at last come to claim them.

Then, almost as one, though unseen one by another, the townsfolk moved back to their houses. They closed their doors and hid inside their homes like frightened rats in the middle of a maze of horror and despair.

What else could they do?

***

FIFTEEN

***

Sarah West was damned if she was going to let a little bit of fog get to her. She was on the main street, she was only a few feet from any of a number places where she could get help in a pinch, and, most important, she was Sarah West.

And Sarah West was not someone who got screwed with. Sarah West was the one who did the screwing. She was one of those rare people who understood the truth: that being called "bitch" was what happened when people were jealous of you, and that people like her always won in the end.

The wind whipped up, flapping her small skirt against her thighs, and she shivered. She wasn't afraid, girls like her didn't get afraid for any reason. But even so...she picked up her pace as much as she could in the thick fog, trying to keep the bright - but rapidly failing - lights of the football field at her back. Finally, though, she had to resort to walking with one foot in the street just to make sure she was walking in a straight line.

She thought of Albert as she walked. Pervy little snot. How many times had she caught him filming her ass over the years? Too many to count. Not that she could blame him for trying. Asses like hers were one in a million, and definitely part of the whole package that was going to be her ticket out of this one-horse hellhole in the middle of Nowhere, Washington. She'd finish high school, then it would be off to Los Angeles for a career as a movie or TV star, or maybe she'd be a pop recording star. She hadn't decided which one she would yet, but knew that whatever one she decided on, it would happen. She was, frankly, perfect for stardom. She had long legs, muscled without losing their femininity; a nice butt; and a rack that was the closest thing to perfect that God had ever created.

And Albert thought he even had a chance at speaking to her! She couldn't help but laugh at that.

The laugh drew her up short, but as soon as the thought had fled she realized something that...disquieted her: she, Sarah West, was completely lost. She couldn't make out anything in the heavy fog, not even the powerful lights over the football field. Not that it was dark, exactly: the fog itself seemed almost to glow with a pale light. But even so, there was no visibility, and she had lost herself in her daydreams to the point that she had no way of making it home.

She sighed and dug out her cell phone. She hated calling her parents for rides: it reminded her that she should have had a car by now. God knew her parents could afford one. But every time she broached the subject they started babbling about "responsibility" and "earning privileges" and even saying such ridiculous twaddle as "you'd have to pay for your own gas." As if. Sarah West had things paid for her. She did not pay for them herself.

The cell phone was a perfect example. It was her fifth one in seven months. None of the others had broken or lost, they had simply gotten old. So when a new one came out a month or two after hers, and when the new one (inevitably) had some feature that hers lacked, or was faster, or even just cuter, she could always convince her parents to fork over the cash to get it.

She dialed home. But instead of hearing the dial tone followed by ringing, she heard...nothing. Well, that wasn't strictly true. She did hear a kind of high-pitched sound, like someone was playing a CD about a billion times too fast, reducing it to a nasty whine.

But no parents.

She clicked the disconnect button and tried again. Same result. Only this time the whine was louder, and then even louder as she listened. Then it slashed out at her like a sonic razor, making her cry out.

And at the same time, a shadow passed by in the mist. Inches away.

Sarah's breath caught in her throat. What had that been? The shadow had been huge, at least the size of a grown man, but it had definitely not been a man passing nearby in the heavy fog.

"Who is it?" she said, and her voice cracked. She coughed, then in a stronger voice said again, "Who is that? Who's out there?" After a second she added, "Tiffini, if that's you I swear to God I'm going to kill you."

If it had been Tiffini, the other cheerleader would have broken up laughing at this point. But there was no sound to be heard at all. Nothing except the high-pitched whine from her cell phone.

She turned the phone off and shivered.

Another shadow passed by. Again, it was man-sized, but Sarah could see even more clearly that whatever it was, it wasn't a man. Two arms, two legs...but its head looked as though it had horns on it.

What the hell? she thought, and began to back away from the shadow. Before she could take a single step, though, the dark patch in the fog had disappeared. She turned around in time to see another one of the shadows pass nearby before it, too, melted into the fog.

A new and unwelcome sensation touched her then: panic. She felt herself start to lose control of everything from her thoughts to her bowels as she realized that whatever was happening, it was no joke sprung on her by the more jealous of the other cheerleaders.

"Leave me alone, you freaks!" she shouted.

As if in response, another one of the strange, horned shadows appeared directly in front of her before melting into the mist as all the others had done. Sarah started to spin around, seeing shadows at every turn, but she could never focus on one for more than a second or even catch the exact moment when a shadow became one with the fog and disappeared from her view.

She became even more disoriented than she had been, a kind of vertigo seizing her, dizzying her, making her reel in place. She caught herself, taking a deep breath, and then took a large step.

Move, she thought. Don't stop. Stopping is what it wants you to do. Gotta move.

She didn't have the courage to examine - even within herself - what "it" might be.

She walked.

Then walked faster.

Then ran. The one consolation was that she seemed to be running in a straight line: her feet were coming down each time on the sidewalk she had been trudging down before this all started.

Slap, slap went her sneakers, her breath coming in short pants as she fought to outrun the shadows that even now surrounded her.

Slap, slap, slap, slap...splash.

Sarah stopped short. She felt her sneaker get wet and instantly looked down.

Only sidewalk at her feet. Not so much as a puddle. But for all that fact, her shoe was undeniably soaked, as though she had just walked into a small stream up to her calves.

She looked around, but could not see anything but fog and the ubiquitous shadows, drawing ever closer, silent and menacing.

She took two more steps.

Slap, slap...splash.

This time the other foot became wet, and suddenly Sarah was transported back in time, feeling as she had on that beautiful summer day when her parents had taken her out on a lake for some waterskiing and her line had somehow gotten fouled in the outboard motor, drawing her under the water and tangling her in a spiderweb of rope that held her down, down, down, and she felt herself drowning again, clawing for air, the only thing that saved her was her mother, who quickly jumped in with a knife and hacked at the waterskiing lines until Sarah was free.

But there was no water here. No more than three houses in all of Rising even had pools.

So how could her feet be wet?

No longer trusting her vision - what if the shadows weren't really there, either? - Sarah knelt down and felt all around her. In every direction she carefully pressed on the ground wherever she could reach it. It was dry concrete no matter where she pressed.

She stood.

Another shadow came by her, and this time it was close enough that she could almost see eyes: grossly distorted, gigantic eyes that stared not at her, but through her. As though she were an insect, or less than an insect: something to be ignored or destroyed, not cared for or pampered as Sarah deserved.

The sight of those awful eyes in the mist was too much. Sarah screamed in terror, and wheeled to run, secure in the fact that she was on solid ground, that she could run like a goddam gazelle, that nothing could happen to her because she was Sarah West, dammit, and bad things didn't happen to Sarah West.

She turned.

She put down a foot.

And fell headfirst into water.

She could see the sidewalk rushing up at her, but instead of hitting herself on the cold concrete, she felt herself fall through it, its surface suddenly as permeable as that of any pool or stream or...

Or lake.

She fell into liquid, her hands paddling with manic ferocity as she tried to claw her way up. She was disoriented, the mist didn't give her enough light to know whether she was swimming up or down. The breath burned in her lungs, she wanted to breathe, she wanted to live, to breathe, to live, she wanted so many things as she clawed there in the dark of the water that could not be there but was.

She broke the surface, gasped a thick draught of clean, misty air, then fell down again, plunging back below the impossible surface of the water that was there though it could not be. The breath was hotter in her lungs now, more insistent and urgent. Again she was clawing for life, trying to find her way to the surface of the - what? What had she fallen into?

She pulled for all she was worth. Pulled and pulled at the water that surrounded her, holding her breath as long as she could, knowing that to gasp, to try to breathe would be the end of her. But with each pull of her arms, the need to breathe grew more critical; with each kick of her feet her lungs demanded air more stridently.

She resisted, still trying to find her way up. Even the mist, the shadows, the fear that waited for her above was better than this.

She prayed, asking God to save her, a part of her marveling that God could have been asleep at the wheel long enough to allow this to happen to her in the first place.

She wanted to breathe, she wanted to breathe, she wanted to breathe.

She clawed, she fought, she struggled.

Where was the air?

She kicked her feet, the muscles in her perfectly proportioned legs pushing her strongly around as she fought for her life.

She wanted...she wanted...

She wanted to breathe.

She fought it. She denied herself. She refused, as long as she could, and then kept insistently refusing to open her mouth, to take that gasp that a part of her was convinced would be so good.

Then, at last, she wondered in the small part of her mind that was still capable of rational thought, What if this is a dream?

What if this isn't real?

Then how do I break out of it? was the next thought.

And the answer was obvious.

So though a small part of her cried out in horror, shrieked "NO!" and tried to stop her, the rest of her - the animal that she had largely become - said "yes" and smiled triumphantly.

And with that smile, Sarah West, beautiful of limb and body, intelligent of mind, perfect in nearly every possible way, opened her mouth and inhaled.

***

SIXTEEN

***

Ox Mackey stood behind the closed door of his store and looked out into the otherworldly mist that had somehow surrounded the town. A dark shape whipped by, too fast to see much, but what Ox could see immediately convinced him that he wanted no part of what was going on outside.

He just stood there, watching, waiting for the inevitable moment when one of the...things...in the mist tried to come in.

But none did.

That was good. Ox knew he could hold his own in a fight, but he had no wish to find out if his skills were up to a brawl with him on one side and some nightmarish creature on the other.

Another one of the shadows appeared out of the fog, and Ox held his breath as it stood for a long moment beside his store.

The door rattled. It was locked. Ox knew it was because he had locked it himself. And now he was especially grateful that he had done so.

The door rattled again, and Ox felt himself tense.

Then the shadow melted away as if by magic, and the door stopped shaking.

There was a popping noise, and suddenly half the store was plunged into darkness as a fuse popped.

Ox looked at the fuse panel. It was behind the counter, high enough on the wall that he would have to stand on the small stepladder he kept around for such emergencies. Normally he waited until a customer came along and asked whomever it was to help out.

Ox didn't like heights.

Actually, it was worse than that: heights absolutely paralyzed him. His own seven foot two inch frame had him high enough that he felt like he was going to break out into a nosebleed sometimes, and anything higher than that...forget about it. Even standing on the small stepladder made him feel nauseated, and he couldn't remember the last time he had set foot on the second floor of a house.

At the same time, however, Ox somehow didn't think that anyone was going to be braving the mist to come get milk or sugar anytime soon. So he had two alternatives: either wait in the dark, or reset the fuse himself.

At first he felt sure that he could wait in the semidarkness of the store. But the shadows kept marching past the plate glass storefront in the fog, and each time one did so he felt a little more exposed; a little less safe.

Finally he could bear the darkness no longer. He would brave the stepladder.

He pushed the ladder to where he needed it, then inhaled deeply and took the first step. Immediately he felt dizzy as all the blood rushed away from his head, as though not even that small part of him wanted to be so high up. He waited a long moment like that, steadying himself, before trying to move again.

Before he could, though, the door rattled once more. It was another one of the shadows, standing at the door. This time the rattling was more insistent than it had been; harder and faster. Ox held his breath, standing halfway up the ladder, his head at the rarefied height of eight feet or so, and waited for the door to be broken down.

But just as it had each time, the door stopped shaking and the shadow moved away, becoming one with the fog that surrounded the store.

Ox took another breath...and took another step.

This time he did not feel faint. The exact opposite occurred, in fact. He grew hyper-aware of everything around him. The hum of the bulbs that were still lit, the feel of the air across his face, the base taste of the salt on his lip. It was almost overpowering, and he stood on that second step for a good five minutes, gulping air in huge draughts until he felt like he could move again.

He reached up a shaky hand and opened the panel that held the circuit breakers. Sure enough, several of them had flipped into the off position. Ox reset them, and the lights powered up to full.

A moment later he looked behind him...and immediately wished he hadn't. The light had apparently acted like a beacon to the otherworldly beasts outside, because it looked like there were more than a dozen of them, huge eyes weird within the mist, the vaguely horn-shaped points on their heads floating back and forth as their heads ululated like seaweed in a gentle current.

The door started to rattle again. Harder this time.

Ox knew he couldn't stay like this; knew he should get down and load one of the shotguns he had in the store. But he couldn't move. The height he stood at had done its work, paralyzing him as completely as though he had sustained a spinal cord injury.

The door rattled harder. Now it was booming as several of the things started hammering on it at once.

Ox had to get down.

Had to get down.

Get down, Ox, get down.

He finally took a step. His foot dropped the six inches to the rung below the one he was standing on. It felt like a tremendous drop, like a fall from heights untold, the six inches stretching into a gap that spanned eternity.

But at last his foot touched down.

One step to go. One step, and then he would be on solid ground and all he would have to worry about was the alien invasion or whatever it was that had gripped Rising in its cool, misty clutches.

Ox inhaled, almost hyperventilating as he tried to psych himself up for that last step.

The door was shaking harder now, rattling so hard he felt sure that the hinges must be about to disintegrate into a million pieces.

One more step.

One more.

He dropped his foot....

And slipped.

His arms windmilled faster than a hummingbird's wings, his body reeled as he tried to withstand the terrible force of gravity that wanted to catch him, to throw him to the ground. Ox tried to overcome the terrible pull, but knew he could not; knew that he was going to fall the terrible half a foot to the ground. He would not suffer long, the tiny part of his brain that remained calm and lucid was saying. He would only fall for a fraction of an instant, and all would be well.

But the rest of Ox's brain was screaming as his foot lost traction.

Now his other foot was slipping, too: he was free-falling.

Falling.

Falling.

That small part of his brain that had counseled against panic was now asking what was happening. Surely he should have touched down on the cool tile floor by now. Surely he couldn't still be falling.

Ox managed to look down. He saw the tile rushing up at him. He saw the highest row of dry goods whip past eye-level. He had to be done. The fall had to be over.

But it wasn't. He kept falling. Impossibly, eternally. He looked down again. Still saw the tile speeding up to meet him, saw the very air that surrounded him rushing past with gale force.

Ox fell. And fell. And fell.

Then he felt his foot touch the ground. At long last, after what seemed like minutes, his foot touched solid earth. But it was not the gentle touch of a six-inch drop. Rather, he felt his ankle shatter as though he had pitched himself to the ground from the highest floor of a skyscraper. He had a split-second to open his mouth in a round "O" of surprise and pain as his ankle compressed, then pushed up through his leg, shattering his tibia and fibula into a thousand thousand small pieces, jagged bone rushing up and pulverizing his femur, his pelvis.

His other foot hit ground, and the process repeated.

He felt his lower extremities driven up like bullets from a gun, bone from his ankles rushing up to fill his body cavities, shredding his guts and tearing through intestines, kidneys, stomach like shrapnel from a cannon.

Ox tried to scream, but his diaphragm was in tatters inside him, and drawing breath was impossible.

The air shot from his lungs, exploding out of his nose in a bloody mist that removed the lining from his sinuses, literally turning him inside out in a blur of mucus and pain.

Then the shredded bones that had once held him aloft reached up, past his intestines, past his stomach. They rent their way through his heart, and blood ceased its pumping instantly.

Ox had a final lingering moment before his oxygen-deprived brain turned off to think of his mother.

Then all was black.

***

SEVENTEEN

***

Lenore moved from her kitchen into the hall for the thousandth time. She couldn't stop. Every time she thought about ceasing her movement, another thud would sound from somewhere else in the house and she would have to go and investigate.

She knew she should leave; should get out, but each time she had moved to the door, she found herself back in the house again, as though she had descended into a fugue state and sleepwalked back to the depths of her domicile.

She had tried to call the police once, had tried to reach out for help through the telephone, but when she went to dial all she got was a strange, high-pitched tone and the realization that if she was talking on the phone that meant that at least one hand was occupied. And that was one hand less than she felt she would need to fight off whoever - or whatever - was in her house with her.

She looked down suddenly as she realized she was holding something.

It was a piece of paper. Dark writing filled its space, the same word written over and over again.

FeAR

Lenore shivered. She didn't remember writing that. Remembered precious little of the last few hours, in fact. It was all a nightmare blur of movement from one room to the next in an endless circuit that never comforted her, but only heightened the feeling of terror that now threatened to overwhelm her.

She felt like she was there again. The place it had happened.

The parking lot.

She squinted and suddenly the lighting in her house changed. It was no longer the cool, sterile light of the neon bulbs she had installed, but was now the flickering yellow of a parking lot lamp, making everything around her appear sickly and jaundiced.

The paper dropped from her nerveless fingers.

What the hell is going on? she wondered, but the words were not angry, or even defiant. Just frightened. Terrified, in fact.

She at last felt whatever chains had bound her to this place during the last hours shatter, and hurried to the front door, intent on leaving. The door had a small window inset at eye level so she could see outside in the event of a knock at the door.

She couldn't see anything out there.

Not her porch, not the street.

Nothing. Just a pale, uniform gray that bespoke the presence of a thick fog. She knew that running into such weather could result in her getting lost within inches of her home, but she didn't care. She had to get out.

She ran to the door, sparing a quick look at the security device next to it. The LED still glowed green. "No intrusions detected."

Then a muffled thud sounded.

She turned, feeling the world dilate around her as though she had stepped into a hole in time-space that would elongate this instant in this place into an eternity of suffering and despair.

She turned, feeling an icy hand grip her heart and begin constricting it.

She turned, and couldn't breathe.

Then she found her breath. She inhaled deeply, then screamed louder than she ever had before, loud enough that she could feel the insides of her throat slough of in an instant under the pressure.

Because he was there.

He was just as he had been, those years ago. Still, impossibly, the same. Mid-thirties, with a face that would have been handsome had it not been so obviously cruel. His eyes were dark pits to Hell under the bushy brows that were now drawn together in a nasty leer.

"Hey, beautiful baby," said the man, and licked his lips.

Lenore shook her head in disbelief. How could this be happening? He was in jail. He couldn't have gotten out, and even if he had, he could not have found her. It was impossible.

As she shook her head, she saw something from the corner of her eye: her hair. It had been drawn back in a severe bun when she got home. She knew it was because that was how she always wore it now. But somehow it was down, hanging loosely around her shoulders, falling in a low sweep of loose, beautiful curls.

Feeling cold, she looked down at herself. Like her hair, her clothing had changed. Gone were the gray skirt and blouse, and her formless gray sweater had also disappeared. Instead, she was now wearing a short skirt that had been cut to show off her legs to maximum effect, and a brightly-colored tank top that dipped low enough that little was left to the imagination.

She started shaking. Her hair, her clothes...even her shoes, which were now spike heels. They had all changed to what she had worn on that night, so many years before, when she had last faced the maniac who even now was walking toward her.

"Beautiful," he said, and licked his lips with a tongue that was dark and scabbed as though leprous. He pulled out a knife, a long, wickedly gleaming blade that she knew could cut through nearly anything.

He rushed at her, his hands outstretched, fingers clutching spasmodically, grasping at her.

Lenore turned to flee, but found the door locked. Triple-locked, in fact, and there was no time to unlock it before the man would be upon her. Indeed, even as she realized that fact, the thug slammed into her from behind, his heavy, hot mass driving her into the wooden door. She hit her face on the door and saw stars, her vision temporarily going black at the edges before she regained her senses. She put one foot up on the wall in front of her and used it to push back, throwing both herself and the thug off-balance.

They fell to the ground in a tumbling pile of thrashing legs. Lenore was on her feet first, having been ready for the sudden movement, but she could see that the man would follow suit in an instant. Again, she had no time to unlock the door and escape into the street, so she took the only avenue left to her.

With a scream of fear and despair long-buried but now somehow resurfacing, Lenore turned and ran deeper into her house, a madman close behind her.

***

EIGHTEEN

***

Jason stood in the doorway to his house, trying one last time to reach someone on his cell phone. He had tried to call the mayor of Rising, Doc Peabody, Hatty's house, and a few others. All had yielded the same result: no dial tone, no ringing, just that loud screeching.

Finally he put the phone away, and grabbed one of the walkie-talkies he kept in the house for emergencies. "This is Sheriff Meeks of Rising," he said on one of the channels. "Anyone on the horn tonight?"

No answer. He tried several other channels as well, but all yielded the same result: nothing but white noise.

On the last attempt, one of those strange, ghostly shadows whipped by him. As it did, the screeching sound that had been his only response on the walkie-talkie increased, startling him. Between the shadow's sudden appearance and the increased noise, he almost dropped the walkie-talkie. But then the shadow passed, and the white noise returned to its previous level.

He put the walkie-talkie away, tacitly admitting defeat, at least inasmuch as trying to reach anyone this way was concerned.

Slowly, however, he became aware of a new sound. Thin, ghostly, it took him a moment to realize where it was coming from and what it was. The sound wafted up from the town below, a shrill chorus that almost rattled his teeth in spite of its low volume. He couldn't place the noise at first, then slowly became aware of what it was, and felt his skin crawl.

Screaming. It was screaming. The entire town was screaming.

This, he realized on some subconscious level, was what an entire town sounded like when it was being murdered.

He acted instinctively, rushing into his house and grabbing his service Beretta from the desk where he kept it, then getting into his truck and peeling away down his loose-gravel driveway. The sound of the gravel under his tires usually yielded a sense of comfort and nostalgia: the sound of coming home and going to work, the sound of a well-ordered world with, thankfully, no more surprises left.

Today, however, on this day of macabre surprises, the noise gave no comfort. Instead the sound was grim and gruesome. It sounded like the crunching of small bones.

Jason sped toward the town, toward the wall of death-sounds that was growing still louder as he approached its source. He could barely see anything through the fog, strange shapes loomed everywhere around, ghost shapes with horns and weird eyes, strange and insubstantial.

The sounds continued, drowning him in a tide of horror and noise, making it impossible for him to think, to concentrate, to...

"Shit!" He screamed and cranked the wheel to one side as a new shape emerged from the white fog. He could tell in an instant that this was a different kind of thing than the specters that had surrounded him in the mist: this was something tangible, something real. It was a human, a fellow traveler in this wasteland of whiteness.

He almost hit the person, but barely managed to avoid the passerby. He screeched to a halt, opened his door, and leaned out.

The person was Lenore. She hadn't even noticed how close to death she had come at his hands, running in a blank terror, already disappearing into the mist.

Jason felt a strange mix of terror and relief. The relief was because this was the first time he was seeing someone real in hours. The terror was because she was so quickly disappearing in the mist, threatening to leave him alone again, rendering him once more solitary in this fearful place of screaming and shadow.

He ran after her without thinking, keeping her barely in his view, shouting her name as they ran through the mist. She didn't respond, just kept running, and when he at last caught up to her and reached out and grabbed her arm, she resisted violently, screaming a banshee wail of terror and battering at him with closed fists.

"Lenore, Lenore!" he yelled. "It's me, it's Sheriff Meeks!"

She opened her eyes wide in sudden comprehension and he saw recognition dawn in her visage. Then her eyes widened still further and she pointed behind him. "Look out!" she screamed.

Jason whipped around and saw what she had been afraid of: a stranger, a man that he had never seen before, running after her - after them both - with a wicked grin and a huge, drawn knife.

Jason had only a microsecond to react. He drew his gun, the first time he had done so in the line of duty, the first time he had drawn a weapon with the intent to use it since that night, since the night he had lost his family, lost his life. "Stop," he shouted in a calm, low tone to the man.

The man did not listen or did not hear. "Stop!" Jason shouted louder, but the thug only had eyes for Lenore.

Jason pulled the trigger. Once, twice, a quick double-tap that he knew would be a death sentence at this range.

The man went down, falling into a soft cushion of mist and disappearing into the fog that swirled around them and pooled at their feet like thin white mud.

Jason turned back to Lenore. The teacher's eyes were still wide, in shock. He had barely a moment to register the fact that she was no longer dressed in her habitual gray outfit. Her almost nun-like clothing had been replaced by an outfit that would have been suitable to a teenager or a young woman who was going out dancing or to sow a little good-natured destruction in the big city.

She was, he realized, not beautiful as he had previously thought. Lenore was, in fact, utterly stunning.

Before he could completely process that, however, she collapsed into his arms with a sob. "What's going on, Lenore?" he asked gently, and stroked her hair. The movement was reflexive, the motion of a family man who had had his share of experience comforting someone in a loving manner. But even as he did it, he realized how close she was, how she felt against him.

He pushed away those thoughts, trying to keep focused on what was going on around them. "What happened?" he asked. "Who was that man?"

"I...I don't know," answered Lenore. But Jason had been a cop for too long to accept that answer. He could tell from her tone and from the way she turned her head as she spoke that she was lying. Lenore knew that man.

He drew the obvious, unfortunate conclusion from her outfit. Surprising, but he had seen far stranger in his years as a police officer. "He was with you?" Jason asked in a low, calm tone.

The violence of Lenore's response surprised him, and probably surprised her as well. "No!" she shouted vehemently, pushing him away as though it had been him who had chased her with a drawn knife. She stared at him dazedly, as though through a veil of shock that prevented her from fully processing what had happened. "I was alone. In my house. Just looked up, and there he was. Out of nowhere." She repeated that last in a low, horrified tone. "Out of nowhere."

"And then?" Jason said encouragingly.

"Ran," she answered. "Ran into the house, deep into the house. Ran for hours, it seemed like hours, it could have been hours, couldn't it?"

The shock he had seen in her eyes was now covering her entirely, rendering her almost catatonic as she whispered "hours" over and over. Jason shook her gently, trying to keep her stable and with him mentally. "It's okay," he whispered. "It's okay now, he's gone, I got him."

At this, Lenore drew suddenly back to reality, looking at him with eyes that were crystalline and clear in their understanding. "He's not gone," she said.

"He is," said Jason. "Believe me, he is."

"Not gone," she said stubbornly.

Jason sighed. Might as well do this now, he thought.

"Come on," he said, and took her to where the body lay. He could see it only as a dark outline in the mist, unmoving. Dead.

At first Lenore didn't want to come, but he had to check and he didn't want to leave her alone in the fog where she would run off and get lost or worse, so he half-dragged her with him. They came to the body, and Jason waved the fog away like smoke, clearing a thin layer and revealing...

"Holy shit," he whispered, and felt his knees go weak.

It was no thug there on the ground, no potential rapist with a knife.

It was someone he recognized from visits to the high school for career day, from time at the football games, from seeing around town.

It was Sarah West. The cheerleader was laying where the thug had been only a moment before. No bullet wounds, thank God, he did not know what he would have done had it turned out that he had shot an innocent child, but there was no disputing the fact that the girl was very dead. Her sightless eyes stared up at him, shrunken back in a face that was blue and swollen.

He saw a dark stain around her, and thought at first that it was blood, then realized that it was simply the sidewalk, but somehow it was saturated with water all around her.

He touched her neck, feeling without hope for a pulse. As he had expected, there was nothing. But he did not expect her to be dripping wet. He touched her, and her clothing squished, water-saturated. When he touched her throat, her mouth drooped slackly, and water poured out. She was completely full of water, inside and out.

"Is she..." began Lenore in a hitching voice.

"Dead," Jason said dazedly. "Drowned, it looks like."

"That's impossible," said Lenore. "Sarah wouldn't have gone anywhere she could have drowned. She was terrified of the water." The teacher gulped, then added, "And the nearest place she could have drowned is the lake, ten miles away."

Jason nodded. "I know," he said. "But that doesn't change the fact that she's drowned." He paused, then realized something. Something that frightened him more than anything else had on this strange night: "It's quiet," he whispered.

The screaming that had been an underlying stream of sound through all the last minutes had dwindled and then stopped. Dead silence billowed like the mist all around them.

"What's happening?" asked Lenore in a hushed voice. And as she did, another one of the eerie shadows passed close by. Jason and Lenore backed away, and saw the thing lean over Sarah's body. The shadow was joined by several others, and as they congregated Sarah's body started to...fade. Suddenly it was shadow as well, no more substantial than any of the other fog-wraiths that milled about in the thick mist.

In only a few moments Sarah West was gone. Dead and disappeared.

The shadows dissipated. Moved away like hyenas after finishing off the last traces of a kill.

Lenore sobbed, and Jason pulled her away with him, leading her backwards until they bumped into something hard and unyielding: his truck. He helped Lenore into the passenger side, then got in the driver's side and put the vehicle in gear.

He accelerated slowly, not wanting to hit any buildings - or anything else - in the fog, but knowing at the same time that they had to keep moving, keep driving, stay alive. Life was movement, he reasoned at an animal level, so as long as they were moving they couldn't be dead, as he almost suspected they were.

A huge shadow suddenly loomed before them, bigger than any of the wraiths had been, and Jason gave a small cry in anticipatory fear before he realized that it was not some new unworldly threat, but rather something much more mundane: he had almost driven through the front of a house.

The house glowed dimly, its lights all on like hazy fog lamps. Jason hesitated for a moment, then got out of the truck, motioning for Lenore to follow him. "Come on," he said quietly, and drew his gun.

"Wait, no!" she said.

"Safety in numbers," he responded.

"What if there are no numbers?" she demanded. "What if everyone in there is dead...or worse?"

"Then I have to find that out, too," he answered, and pointed to the Sheriff's star that was pinned to his shirt. "It's my job. But I don't want to leave you out here alone, so please...."

They entered the house together, going through the door that was - surprisingly - unlocked. Jason quickly recognized the home as belonging to Jack and Dot Powell, a retired couple that had lived in Rising all their lives. He and Lenore went room to room through the place, and he felt tension rising in him like a living beast as they called for the Powells.

No answer. Food was half-eaten on the table, and a pan simmered on the stove. Jason turned off the flame, and realized that the clock built into the oven-top was blurred. He shook his head as though to clear it, but the numbers did not grow clearer. They remained strange and impossible to discern.

The house was empty. The inhabitants had left mid-meal. Left, or been taken.

"No one here," he said at last.

"What now?" asked Lenore. He was grateful to hear how calm she seemed. Whatever happened to her earlier, it had clearly shaken her, but she was just as clearly determined not to let it rule her or divert her from the task of survival. Jason almost smiled at her, feeling a pull within him as the attraction he had already felt toward her deepened in small increments.

"There are five more houses on this street," he answered.

Lenore gulped, but did not complain or whine. Instead, she merely said, "We look?"

Jason nodded. "We look."

And they did. But at each house, they saw only more of the same: half-eaten food, blurred digital clocks. At one house there was a poker game, the hands still splayed out in front of empty chairs. At another they found black crayon notes. "Fear." "It's started." "Crak in the dam."

No one was anywhere. They did not speak during their search, as though they were traipsing through a cemetery at midnight and were too frightened to talk; perhaps that was close to the truth.

They returned to Jason's truck and clambered back inside. "What now?" asked Lenore again.

"Sheriff's station," answered Jason.

"Why there?" said Lenore.

"Because I know it. Because there are weapons there. But mostly," he said, pulling slowly into the fog-bound street, "because I can't think of anything better to do."

They didn't drive long before seeing something strange: a bright glow in the road before them. "What is that?" asked Jason, more to himself than anything. Still, Lenore answered.

"Football stadium?"

"No, the lights are too low," he said.

"Then what is it?"

Jason peered into the mist, trying to will it apart. Then, slowly, he realized what the light must be, and smiled. Lenore saw him and repeated, "What is it?"

"It's Hatty," said Jason, and gunned the engine forward.

***

NINETEEN

***

The sheriff's station was awash in bright light, lit like a torch from within and without. Every light in the station was on, and the place was also illuminated with numerous portable floodlights.

Jason grinned for the first time since this ordeal had begun what seemed like a thousand years ago. "Hatty must have set this up to lead everyone here; to get the townspeople somewhere safe."

"Good thinking," said Lenore.

"That's Hatty for you."

He felt his spirits lift exponentially with each foot they came closer to the station, so by the time they entered the station he was practically beaming. His smile quickly dissipated, however, as he saw that, far from a milling crowd of Rising inhabitants, there was only one person inside: Hatty herself.

The old woman was slumped in her usual chair, chin resting on her chest. Jason tensed when he saw her, thinking that she must be dead. But no, he could see that she was breathing - easy enough to spot in the brightness of the office. Hatty had set several of the portable spots up inside the place, as though to warm the office with light.

Jason smiled again. "Hatty, we're home," he said in his best Ricky Ricardo voice - not a very good imitation, he knew, but he was proud of the fact that his spirits had risen enough to even attempt levity.

The old woman jerked as though surprised, but did not raise her eyes to face them. She remained in her stooped position, though one hand feebly gestured for them to come closer. Jason immediately grew wary. Something was wrong.

"Hatty?" he said quietly. He approached the old woman, and realized that she was whispering something, over and over:

"So dark. So dark. So dark...."

And now, at last, she sat upright, groaning as she did, as though it cost her every last bit of strength she had. She looked at Jason. And he inhaled in shock. Gone were the kind, twinkling old eyes. Now she looked at them with only blank, pupil-less orbs of solid white.

Lenore gave a small yip of surprise and anguish, and as she did, Hatty started crying. Even her tears were wrong, milky stains of pus-like moisture dripping down her cheeks.

"I tried," the old woman sobbed. "I tried to make it light, lit up everything I could, but it didn't work. Didn't work. The dark came. I put on the lights but it...all...went...dark!" And with that the old woman suddenly shrieked, writhing, clawing at her eyes in pain. "It hurts!" she screamed. "Too dark, too dark! Not the dark!"

She began bleeding as she tore at her own eyes, the eyelids scraping off with two vicious tears of her fingernails, the eyes themselves puncturing and seeming to sag in their sockets. "It hurts!" she screamed again, but did not stop her self-mutilation.

Jason was too shocked to move at first, but then he ran to her, crossing the space between them in two large steps and trying to grab her arms; to stop her from further injuring herself.

"The dark!" she screamed again, tearing away from his hands and continuing to rasp at her own face and eyes. Then she stopped suddenly. Her face went pale and her lips went blue, even the blood from her wounds seeming to lose color and vitality in an instant. She convulsed in her seat and grabbed her right arm in the classic tell-tales of a heart attack. She thrashed back and forth for a single moment, moaned loudly, and then went limp. Her ruined eyes stared into nothing, her breath ebbed from her in a loud gasp. A single black tear traced its way from one eye down her cheek.

"So...dark," she whispered. And she slumped again, her head coming to rest on her chest once more, then continuing down, down, down as she fell off the chair. She hit the floor face first, the movement so sudden that Jason didn't have the time to process what was happening, let alone prevent it in any way. She hit her nose on the floor, and he could hear it break and saw blood spatter across the tile. But Hatty didn't react, didn't move an iota.

"Hatty!" he shouted. He rolled her over. Her eyes still stared at nothing, and a blue tongue lolled from her mouth. He felt for a pulse. None. "Hatty!" he screamed again, and began chest compressions.

Without being asked, Lenore instantly moved to Hatty's mouth, pressing the woman's nose and breathing into her mouth after Jason had compressed her chest five times. "Breathe!" he shouted unnecessarily. Lenore breathed again, and then nodded at him. Five more compressions, two more breaths. He checked her pulse. Nothing. They kept up the CPR for several long minutes, but within the first twenty seconds Jason knew that the old woman was gone.

He rocked back on his heels. "Dammit," he groaned. Then he shouted it: "Dammit, dammit, dammit!" He felt tears, hot and salty, dripping down his cheeks, felt snot run from his nose. Lenore's hand touched his shoulder, then traveled down his arm and to his hand.

He clutched at her, holding her hand like it was a life preserver. And in a way, he supposed it was. Hatty had been his main reason for living for so long, his main connection to humanity, and now she was gone, her ruined face staring up at him in a macabre facsimile of the person she had once been. So he held to Lenore, drawing her close to him, holding her for warmth, for life. She stiffened at first, then relaxed and returned his embrace and the two of them held one another, survivors in the shipwreck that Rising had become, bounced and tossed with the waves of horror that had enveloped the place.

"What now?" Lenore asked, pressing herself into his chest.

Jason was silent for a time, still grappling with the loss of the old woman, of his oldest friend. Finally, though, he found his voice and said, "We go. Out of Rising. As fast as we can."

He could tell from Lenore's relieved sigh that she was happy to hear this, but his respect for her grew in the next moment when she showed she was not just concerned with saving her own skin. "What about the rest of the town?" she asked. "Shouldn't we help them?"

"I think," he replied, looking out the window. The mist was still there, the dark shadows still writhed like nightmares and he was sure that it was only a matter of time before they came for Hatty as they had come for Sarah West. "I think they're all dead," he finally finished, giving voice at last to the fear that had plagued him since arriving at the abandoned station.

"I think they're all dead."

***

TWENTY

***

They drove slowly, crawling along through the darkness that surrounded the town. The mist still seemed to glow with an otherworldly light, but the illumination neither warmed Lenore nor made her feel any safer. On the contrary, it reminded her that whatever was happening, it was happening in a place grown suddenly alien and strange, a place where light shed no light and where shadows took corpses in the mist.

"Can't we go any faster?" she asked Sheriff Meeks. He frowned, and she noted that even when he frowned, his eyes were kind and alert. He was something she had heard of but never expected to find: a good man.

"Not unless you want to find out what paint feels like, splashed all over the side of some building."

He maintained their slow pace, but suddenly something loomed before them. A sign. "See ya! Town of Rising says Goodbye and invites you to return to the Friendliest Little Place on Earth."

The mist seemed to die down a bit as they passed the sign, and Lenore felt hope bloom inside her breast. "We're through," she breathed. "We made it."

"Here's hoping," the sheriff responded, but she could tell from his clenched jaw and white knuckles that he didn't believe it. Either that or he did believe it, and was worried that their escape would be snatched away from them instantly.

He hit the gas, accelerating a bit as the mist thinned. But Lenore soon saw that whatever was happening, it wasn't over. The mist kicked up again, thickening around them. She saw the sheriff grind his teeth in anger and perhaps despair.

But he didn't decelerate. Indeed, she saw his foot plunge down on the accelerator and felt the truck lurch forward even as visibility disappeared.

"Shouldn't you slow down?" asked Lenore. Sheriff Meeks didn't answer, his gaze riveted on the road ahead. "Sheriff?" she tried again. "You're scaring me."

Still no answer. The truck moved faster and faster, the tachometer redlining as the sheriff pushed the truck to its limits in a clear attempt to rip them free of the town and its evil influences.

Then she screamed as a woman suddenly stepped out into the road in front of them; screamed again in the next instant as she saw the woman's face. It was only half there, destroyed by what looked like a bullet wound.

"Elizabeth!" screamed the sheriff in a voice steeped in despair and fear. He cranked the wheel to one side in order to avoid hitting this stranger, this walking corpse, and Lenore felt the world crumble in on her as the truck hit a rut, bounced, and then slammed into something with bone-crushing force. She heard a loud "pop" and knew it must be the vertebrae shattering inside her neck and back, and then she slammed forward into something unyielding, and the darkness claimed her as its own.

***

She awoke, though she could not say whether seconds or hours had passed. She looked in front of her and saw a pillow from her bed.

No, that wasn't right. She wasn't in bed.

She shook her head to clear it of the fog that gripped her, and realized in a moment that what she had taken to be a pillow was in fact an air bag. The popping she had heard must have been the sound of the explosives that ringed the safety device going off, allowing it to escape its hiding spot in the dashboard of the truck and inflate at the speed of sound, saving her from crashing into the windshield of the truck; probably saving her life.

She looked over.

The sheriff was gone.

His air bag had gone off as well, but it hung loosely from the steering wheel, completely deflated.

Where was Sheriff Meeks? she wondered, and felt her stomach drop at the prospect of being alone. Especially since being alone meant that she would be lost in this thick fog, with the possibility of running into him again, of running into the man who had caused her so much pain and grief.

The thought of him made her break out in a cold sweat, and she could feel her respiration increase as she started to panic. She almost had a heart attack then, as the door tore open with a shriek of twisted metal!

But it was only Sheriff Meeks. "So sorry," he said. "So sorry. I just...I just...." He didn't finish the thought, but took a knife from his belt and stabbed her air bag. It ripped open and a blast of warm air hit her in the face, but in a second the air bag hung like afterbirth from the dashboard and she had enough room to remove her safety belt and get out of the truck.

Moving was painful; she was sure she had bruised some ribs in the crash. But she made no murmur of complaint. She could see that the sheriff was grappling with something terrible right now, something that must have to do with that dead woman they had seen - Elizabeth, he had called her.

But there was no time to ask him what had just happened, what it was he knew that she didn't. Because in that instant she saw where they were.

"Jesus," whispered the sheriff. And she didn't get the feeling that he was swearing, more that he was uttering a short prayer. Nor could she blame him when she saw what they had crashed into.

It was the general store. They had smashed halfway through the plate glass window at the front of the store and then must have careened into a load-bearing wall with a thick steel core, because the front of the truck had crumpled and they had stopped moving fast enough for the air bags to go off.

"This is impossible," said the sheriff as he looked at the front of the store. "We were outside of town. We were outside of town, so how could we crash into the general store on Main Street?"

"Well," said Lenore, trying to muster enough courage to speak without crying. "We're not outside town anymore."

"No," agreed the sheriff. "We're right back where we started from."

"Guess whatever is doing this doesn't want us to leave," she said. Then she shouted and pointed into the store.

The sheriff stepped gingerly through the broken window and into the store. She followed him a moment later, walking into the bright store and staring at what had made her shout.

It was Ox. He was laying facedown on the tile floor next to a small footstool. Blood pooled all around, and the floor had shattered around him in a crazed fashion, spider cracks running through the tile and allowing her to see that even the concrete below the tile had been smashed.

Sheriff Meeks leaned down next to Ox and touched the big man's neck. He yelped as he did so, and pulled his fingers back as though he had been burnt. "What is it?" asked Lenore.

"Soft," answered the sheriff.

"Soft?"

The lawman nodded. "He's soft."

Lenore noted then that the body looked strange: lacking shape, somehow, like it was a bag and not a human being made of muscle and bone.

She reached out a trembling finger to touch the big man's arm. Her fingers sunk in like she was touching putty, and she too yelped and pulled her fingers back - but not until they had slid into his body up to the knuckles.

"Where are his bones?" she asked, aware that she was sounding for all the world like one of her third-graders and not caring in the least.

The sheriff didn't seem to mind, either. He just stood up and looked over the store. The aisles were full of debris, she saw: items knocked off shelves, plaster dust everywhere, even some tiles from the ceiling were strewn about. It was as though an earthquake had struck the store, and somehow she knew that the destruction was not the result of their crashing into the place.

The sheriff looked back at the big man then. "Like he fell," he murmured.

The lights went out then, flickering once and then plunging them both into darkness. Mist curled in over the broken window, crawling into the general store like a living being.

It covered Ox. Lenore looked away. "What now?" she said.

Suddenly, she could hear something in the mist. Screams. Faint, but screams.

Sheriff Meeks stepped toward the window to leave. "Where are you going?" she asked.

"We have to find out what's happening to the town," he answered.

Dread filled her belly. She knew he was going to say that, but it tore her apart inside nonetheless. "Can't we stay here?" she pleaded.

The sheriff looked at her with a concerned expression, and she could tell he was weighing his words carefully, trying to spare her any unnecessary pain. "We can't," he finally said. "If we stay here, then we're just going to end up dead like everyone else. We have to find out what's happening and try to stop it." He held out a hand to Lenore.

She hesitated. Then took his hand.

He helped her over the dangerous shards of glass that still clung like witch's teeth to the windowpane of the general store, and then kept on holding her hand for a moment.

In spite of their predicament, in spite of all the danger, in spite of everything that had happened that night, she felt warmth bloom where he touched her. It spread up her arm and into her chest, touching her heart and making it beat faster for a wonderful moment.

Then he let go, and she thought she saw something - was it guilt? - flash across his face.

"Come on," he said gruffly. "We have a town to investigate."

***

Hours later she was on the verge of falling over from exhaustion, and they had found nothing useful. Just empty house after empty house. Half-eaten meals, clocks that were strangely out of focus and impossible to read, dim screams sounding all around them...and the shadows. The phantoms in the mist that seemed to be everywhere and nowhere at once. Never touching them, always moving too fast to be followed. Not always, but often when a shadow passed, the sheriff's walkie-talkie would blast out a high-pitched whistle, and he joked in a low voice that at least they had an early warning system.

She did not laugh. The shadows were too frightening to laugh about, with their horned heads and glassy eyes.

They stepped out of one last house, and she bent over to rub her aching calves, wishing she had some other footwear than the heels. She had toyed with the idea of taking some other clothes from one of the houses, but immediately discarded it: she would not steal from the dead. Nor was she about to go back to her own house; not with what had just happened there. She only felt safe next to the sheriff, and so she would brave the blisters that the heels gave her, knowing that to have no footwear in this mist could prove dangerous since they could barely see the ground ahead of them. She thought about what her feet would look like if she had stepped out of the sheriff's truck without shoes when they were surrounded by broken glass at the general store, and shuddered.

The mist surrounded them as always, and Lenore whispered, "What now?" The sheriff held up his hand, motioning her to silence. "What is it?" she said after a long moment.

"Listen."

"I don't hear anything."

"Neither do I," said Sheriff Meeks. "The screaming's stopped."

The mist was thick, but she realized that the shadows were nowhere to be seen, either. As though they had done their work and gone. "We're all alone," she whispered in a frightened voice. Somehow, the silence was as terrifying - if not more so - as the screams had been.

"Should we try to leave?" asked the sheriff.

"No," she answered. "It's not over. Can't you feel it, Sheriff?"

"Call me Jason," he said, and tried to grin. "I hoped that feeling was just my underwear being too tight."

The mist billowed around her and the sheriff - around her and Jason, she corrected herself. "It's not over," she whispered again.

Then a deep, dark voice, a voice that had been to Hell and taught the devil about fear, sliced out of the mist. "No," said the voice. "For you, it's just beginning."

Lenore felt herself turn inside out.

It was him.

***

TWENTY ONE

***

Jason didn't know who the man was, but knew that he had already killed him once tonight. And of all the things that had happened, of all the phantasms and ghosts that this misty night had brought, somehow the man that stood before him was the most impossible of the sights. Lenore screamed, and Jason pulled his gun out and shot without thinking, as sure in his gut that the man before them was evil as he was that she was good.

The man went down, swallowed instantly in the mist.

But Jason had no time to revel in the win, had no time to even think because in the same instant Lenore screamed again. Jason swung around and saw that the man had reappeared behind him. The man's knife glinted in the mist as he ran toward them, coming at them like an unstoppable leviathan; a juggernaut born of the mist and not capable of being defeated.

"Come on!" shouted Jason. He ran full bore, hearing the man's cry behind them: an animal sound that writhed within him like a serpent, driving him onward faster and faster. "Hurry!"

A shape loomed in the mist before them: a house. Jason acted without thinking, barreling at the door without slowing. He hit it at top speed, felt the hinges crash inward before him and was grabbing at Lenore's hand almost in the same instant, pulling her deeper into the house, pushing her behind him.

He stood in the doorway, his gun drawn and ready, waiting for the man with the knife.

The man did not come. No intruder came out of the mist. Indeed, the opposite happened: the mist suddenly withdrew from the house, pulling backward as though sucked up by a vacuum cleaner, forming a perfect wall of fog about twenty feet away.

As though it was waiting.

"Great," whispered Lenore behind him. "What now?"

"Something fun, no doubt," he said back.

They waited. And waited. And waited. Then Lenore shouted from behind him and Jason spun around, almost squeezing off a round before he realized that the madman had not materialized behind them again. Instead, it was a smaller, rounder figure. A teenager that Jason had seen around town, though the boy's name escaped him for the moment.

"Albert," said Lenore in a relieved tone.

The teenager stepped closer to them, and his lip quivered. Jason could see he was trying not to cry, and couldn't blame him. "Are you real?" the boy asked. He was holding a video camera, clutching it to him like a high-tech security blanket.

"Yes, sweetie," said Lenore. "We're real." Jason saw tears well in the boy's eyes as well as in Lenore's, both of them obviously glad to have found even one other person alive.

Jason closed the front door. A large bay window nearby allowed a view outside. The mist was still in its holding pattern. Still waiting. But not coming any closer.

"What happened to my parents?" asked Albert. Jason experienced a flash of anger, of irritation that this boy should come out of nowhere and ask for an explanation, as though any of them knew what could be happening.

Lenore was apparently made of better stuff, however, for she tried to comfort the teen. "They're probably just waiting for you at home," she said.

The boy's expression fell. "This is home," he said. A moment later he looked at Jason. "They're dead, aren't they?"

Jason had no answer to that. He looked out at the mist again, then at Albert. "Is there somewhere safer than this? Somewhere we can defend? Basement?"

Albert nodded, and motioned them to follow him. The teen led them down a stairwell in the kitchen. "After I ran..." he said haltingly.

"Yes, Albert?" said Lenore. Again Jason marveled how soft her voice was, how caring her tone. She seemed to have put the night away from her in the last minute, focusing all her energy not on panic or worry for herself, but on concern for the chubby kid who now led them into his family's basement.

"I was hiding out," said Albert. "Dunno how long. Hours, days, it's hard to tell in the mist, isn't it?"

"Yes," soothed Lenore as the boy's voice started to crack. "It is hard to tell."

"Everything went crazy," he said.

"Did you see anything?" asked Lenore. Jason was silent. Lenore was asking all the right questions and was doing it with far more composure than he himself would have, so he was content to let her conduct this investigation for now.

"Just mist," said Albert. "And...."

"And what?"

"You'll think I'm nuts, just like everyone," he said.

"No, we won't," insisted Lenore.

"You will," he said again. He laughed hollowly. "Shit, I think I'm crazy."

Jason somehow intuited what Albert was going to say. "Ghosts," he said to the boy. "You saw ghosts." It was not a question.

Albert stopped walking, staring at Jason. "Yeah," he finally said. "Shapes. And then I heard screams everywhere. So I ran home." He sniffled and wiped a hand across his eyes. "The kids at school are right: I'm just a big fat baby."

"No," said Lenore. "We all ran tonight. We all panicked. With all the weirdness that's going on, no one blames you for what you might have done. No babies here."

"Were your parents here when you arrived?" asked Jason.

Albert shook his head.

"No. They were gone."

They walked the rest of the way to the basement in silence, and Albert shut and locked the door that was at the bottom of the stairs behind them, securing the area for now. If anything was secure. Jason remembered that Amy-Lynn had disappeared from a closed room, and doubted very much that the small lock in the door would deter whatever was out there from getting in if it wanted to.

Jason looked around. He saw a heavy supply cabinet and moved it in front of the door. It probably wouldn't make any more difference than the pitiful door lock, but it made him feel a little better.

As he moved the cabinet, he glanced around the basement and saw that he was in geek-Heaven. Comic books were piled in huge stacks everywhere. One corner held a television with various video game systems hooked up to it, and another corner was full of video equipment and editing paraphernalia. The last wall had a refrigerator and a shelf full of snack foods on it. Albert apparently saw him looking around because he grinned in a self-deprecating manner and said, "Welcome to the clubhouse." He grabbed a handful of chips from an open bag and began crunching them loudly. "I've been mostly down here," he said. "It feels safer."

"Have you seen anything else? Heard anything other than what you've told us?"

Albert hesitated. "I was...drawing," he said at last. "Sometimes it takes my mind off things. When everyone's being mean or when I'm worried." He chomped some more chips nervously, then continued, "So I was drawing. Or at least, I thought I was."

He opened a tablet of paper. Inside was page after page, each covered with black crayon writing. "cRaK IN the DAm," "it'S StarTInG," "FeAR."

Jason said nothing. He didn't know what to say.

"You think I've gone crazy, don't you?" said Albert. Clearly the kid was more than a little paranoid.

Again, Lenore came to the rescue with her soothing, motherly tones. "No, Albert. We don't think you're crazy. I wrote something similar, myself."

"What does it mean?" asked Albert. He looked at Jason. "Did you draw these things, Sheriff?"

"Yeah," answered Jason. "And I also saw some weird things. Not just the mist and the shadows. On my computer."

"What?" asked Lenore.

"Pictures," he said, unwilling to linger on the hideous images of death and mayhem that he had seen on the screen in his office. "And I thought I saw...." He gulped, then continued. "I thought I saw my wife and son."

"Didn't know you were married, Sheriff," said Albert.

Jason felt his mouth firm into a straight line. "They're dead," he said simply. "But on my computer, I saw them. It looked like they were trying to say something."

"What?" asked Lenore.

"Don't know. There were a lot of things flashing. My family, lots of pictures of disasters, some words."

"What words?" asked the teacher, her brow furrowing in thought.

"Not the same as on the papers," he said. "Not that crazy crayon stuff." He thought back, trying to recall. "I can only remember one: Roanoke." He frowned. "Wait. Harama? No. What was it?"

"I know the word Roanoke from somewhere," said Lenore. "It was an early American colony, I think."

"What does that have to do with us?" said Jason.

Suddenly Albert spoke up. "Was one of the words 'Harappan'?" he asked.

Jason snapped his fingers. "Yes. How did you know?"

For a moment Jason thought that the boy had gone insane. He tore into a stack of comics with manic fury. "Because I know what Harappan is, and what it has to do with Roanoke," he said, holding out a comic book in a plastic bag.

Jason took it. "'The Disappeared'?" he asked.

Albert nodded. "Limited set. I have all thirty five issues." Then, as though Jason had challenged his choice of collection, he added, "It's an investment." He took back the plastic-wrapped book and looked at it for a long moment. Finally, he said, "Screw it," and yanked the wrapping off the book. Then he grabbed another comic and did the same. Then another, and another, soon accumulating a small pile on the floor.

The overweight kid grabbed one of the issues and handed it to Jason. "Issue eighteen, Roanoke," he said. Then he picked up another one. "Number twenty four: The Harappans."

Jason picked up several other comics. "These were the other names I saw. Chinese Army. Hoer-Verde."

"What are they all about, Albert?" asked Lenore

Albert thumbed through one of the comics, entering power-nerd mode. Jason smiled in spite of himself, remembering for a moment the days when he had collected comics; when he had been so innocent and full of life.

"They're all cities or cultures that disappeared," said Albert. "Roanoke," he continued, gesturing at the first comic he'd given Jason. "You were right, Miss Harris, it was an early American settlement. But colonists who followed them came to Roanoke and found it deserted. Food still on tables, beds unmade, clothing in the houses. Everyone just disappeared."

"And the Chinese army?" asked Jason. "It hasn't disappeared."

"No," said Albert. "But a unit of three thousand soldiers disappeared without a trace outside Nanking in nineteen fifty seven."

"Same with Hoer-Verde?" asked Lenore.

Albert nodded. "The six hundred inhabitants of Hoer-Verde, Brazil, disappeared on February fifth, nineteen twenty three. Police went through the town, and all they found was a discharged gun and a note on the blackboard."

"What did the note say?" asked Lenore.

Albert grew quiet. "'There is no salvation,'" he finally said.

"What about Harappans?" said Jason.

"Even scarier," said Albert. "Not a town or a group of people, an entire civilization disappeared in Pakistan about two thousand B.C. No one knows why."

"They all just disappeared?" Lenore asked, gesturing at the dozens of comics on the basement floor.

"History is full of mass disappearances," said Albert. "Times when entire communities just faded away."

"Just like ours," Jason nodded. He locked eyes with Lenore. "Just like Rising." Then he looked at Albert, the apparent resident expert on their situation. "But why not us?" he said. "Why has everybody else disappeared, but not us?"

Albert fiddled with his camcorder nervously. "I don't know," he finally admitted.

Jason deflated somewhat. He had been so hopeful that Albert would have had the answers to all this. But no.

And then the supply cabinet he had pushed against the door to the basement bucked wildly as something shattered the doorway.

***

TWENTY TWO

***

Fog flowed into the room like a living pool of whitewater as soon as the door flew off its hinges. Jason managed not to scream, but he heard Lenore and Albert yelling beside him. With the fog came the phantoms, and at the same moment his walkie-talkie went crazy, issuing high-pitched squeals that grated worse than nails on a chalkboard.

Notwithstanding the fact that the phantoms had yet to touch them or harm them, being so close to the things was not in Jason's itinerary. "Come on," he hollered, and grabbed Lenore's hand. She in turn grasped Albert's hand, and he led them in a small train up the stairs. The shadows poured past them into the basement below and lights flashed strobiscopically in the mist, disconcerting and frightening.

They ran as one into the foyer of Albert's house, toward the front door. Jason glanced to the side as they did, and saw a huge shape barreling at them through the mist. And this was no phantom, he could tell: it had a weight, a substantial reality that the wraiths did not have.

"Down!" shouted Jason, driving Lenore and Albert down below him as he hit the deck. They fell in a heap as the bay window shattered inward.

Jason gasped.

It was the deer. The deer that he had shot on his hunt, the same one that had disappeared. Its face and neck had been torn by his shot, blood and foam matted its fur around its mouth. It was bloody, broken, but still moving somehow.

And most horrific of all: at the front of the deer, impaled on its antlers, so beautiful and deadly at the same time, was Jonesy. The veteran hunter shouted quietly as the deer rammed into the wall, driving its antlers right through the hunter.

Jason had a moment to remember Jonesy's words when the hunter had shown up at the general store to buy shot: "I figured I'd get out of town. Go up to the mountains where the only thing I have to worry about is a rogue dear impaling me or something."

The hunter looked at Jason for a long moment, then his eyes rolled back and he died, pinned to the wall by a dead buck's antlers.

Jason grabbed Lenore and Albert and dragged them out of the house, back into the mist that was still frightening but not nearly so terrifying as the prospect of being shut up inside the house with mist, phantoms, and the frightful trophy that now adorned Albert's wall.

As before, all was pale darkness and disorientation in the fog. Glimpses of phantoms all around, seemingly ever more numerous, made everything seem crowded, strange, and dangerous. He tried to ignore them; tried even harder when he thought he saw a petite shape in the mist, holding hands with an even smaller form.

Aaron. Elizabeth.

He thrust the thoughts from his mind. It wasn't them. It couldn't be. They were dead and gone and would not come back. They were in oblivion, and he knew he would never see them again; anything he did see was just a trick of this horrible fog.

Behind him, Lenore screamed.

"What?"

"I thought I saw him," she whispered.

"The man with the knife?" asked Jason. She nodded. Jason pulled them on faster, moving quickly away from the area.

Then Lenore stopped, shivered. "What?" asked Albert.

"This is where Sarah West..." her voice petered off, and Jason realized that Albert had no way of knowing what had happened to his classmate.

But apparently Albert didn't need to be told. "She's dead, too," he guessed.

Jason said nothing, just pulling the group onward. Soon they were back at the Sheriff's station, which was still lit from within and without.

Hatty's body was gone.

"They're all disappearing," said Lenore. "Like Roanoke. Like the Harappans."

"Then why not us, too?" demanded Jason. "Why not us?" He knocked over a table, so frustrated that he simply had to vent somehow. He pushed Hatty's computer off her desk, the electronics sparking as it crashed to the ground.

Lenore moved instantly away, and he sensed her fear had suddenly focused on him. "Stop it," she whispered.

He was disconcerted that he had frightened her, and even more upset to realize how much he didn't want that. But before he had a chance to apologize, she began screaming, "Stop it, stop it, stop it!"

He stopped moving, embarrassed and alarmed at the rabidity of her outburst. "Sorry," he said lamely. "I just...I don't know what to do."

"Don't throw things," she said. "Don't...don't be like that."

"Sorry," he soothed, trying desperately to exude calm, hoping that she could forget and forgive his outburst. "No more throwing things. We'll just stick together and figure out what's going on. Right, Albert?" There was no answer, so he looked around. "Albert?"

Albert was gone.

Lenore instantly assumed a defensive look, not so much for herself as for the missing boy, and Jason again marveled at how she could be so concerned about other people in a time like this.

She'd be a great mother, he thought. He suppressed the urge to take her hand, instead settling for following her as she rushed out of the Sheriff's station.

"Albert," she hollered, "where are you?"

"Albert!" Jason added.

Both of them jumped as they heard a voice nearby.

"Right here," said Albert.

Jason felt the relief as a tangible force that flushed through him like cool water. Albert had not disappeared like the rest of the town; had not died horribly and impossibly like Ox or Sarah West. No, the boy was standing next door to the Sheriff's station, looking up.

Jason followed the boy's gaze upward. The clocktower. It was, he realized, the first non-digital clock he had seen since he had first seen the microwave clock in the Rand home. Like the digital clocks, the analog hands of this clock were a blur, but unlike the high-tech clocks, he could still make out the hands, barely. They were moving, but so fast he couldn't focus on them properly. Minutes swept by in seconds, hours in minutes.

"Now what?" Jason said, more to himself than anything.

Surprisingly, in this night of questions, he got an answer. "I know what's happening," said Albert.

Jason and Lenore both looked at him. The boy almost shrank under their gaze, clearly unaccustomed to being listened to. "Well?" prompted Lenore.

"It's fear," said Albert.

"That's what the crayon notes said," replied Jason, "but that doesn't help us much."

"Yeah, the notes were right," said Albert with a bit more confidence. "It's fear."

"What do you mean?" asked Lenore.

"This all started with Sean, right?" asked Albert.

Jason nodded. "I think so," he said.

Albert turned to Lenore. "Is it true what they were saying about him in school?"

Before Lenore could answer, Jason said, "What were they saying in school?"

"That he was afraid of the monster in the basement, and that's where he died," answered Lenore. To Albert she said, "Yes, from what I understand he did die in his basement."

Albert nodded sagely. "The monster got him," he said simply.

"What do you mean by that?" asked Lenore, beating Jason to the same question.

"That the thing that frightened Sean the most...it came true."

"This is insane," said Jason.

"Is it?" Albert turned to Lenore. "How did Sarah die?"

"You don't want to hear-" began Lenore.

"She drowned, didn't she?" asked Albert.

"How did you know that?" demanded Jason.

"Because she was afraid of water," said Albert, warming to his subject. "So somehow she drowned in the middle of town."

"And Ox was afraid of heights," said Lenore, looking at Jason with haunted eyes. "And remember how his store looked; how Ox looked?"

Jason tried to find a flaw in what they were saying, but couldn't...other than the fact that it was utterly insane. But then, everything that had happened tonight was insane. He looked at the floodlights all around the Sheriff's station and murmured something under his breath.

"What?" asked Lenore.

"Scared of the dark," repeated Jason, remembering his secretary. "It's what Hatty said she was afraid of."

"And I'm betting that's how she died," said Albert. "I don't know how dark could kill you, but I bet it did."

Jason shuddered, remembering Hatty's blind, white eyes, and the way she had clawed at herself so hard she had a heart attack and died in her own personal darkness. He nodded. Then shook his head. "No, I don't believe this."

"It's the only thing that makes sense," insisted Albert.

"Sense?" said Jason incredulously. "Your definition must be a tad different from mine."

"I believe him," whispered Lenore.

"You can't be serious."

"I am." She looked at the youth beside her. "Because my fear is here, too."

"What do you mean?" asked Jason, though he had a strong suspicion what she was going to say. He was surprised, however, because Lenore said nothing. She just looked at the clocktower and then walked into the Sheriff's station.

Albert took a moment to put his camcorder down on a nearby wall, aiming it into the mist, then he followed the teacher inside.

Jason sighed and followed suit.

Lenore was inside, sitting at Hatty's old desk, holding herself.

"The man," she said without preamble. "The one you shot. The one we keep seeing. I know him."

"How?" asked Jason.

"Before I moved here," she began, "I-" Her voice cut off. Her mouth moved, but no sound was forthcoming.

"What happened?" asked Jason. He reached out and touched her hand softly. It was hard for him, to reach out and try to connect with someone this way after so many years, but he simply couldn't let her feel alone. He wanted to protect her, to stay with her and make sure she got through this thing alive.

"It was in a parking lot," she said. "I remember his smell. Wine, some kind of cheap booze. And beneath it, something worse, evil. Rotten." She clutched herself even harder. "That smell stayed on me for months. I still smell it sometimes. Even now."

"What happened to him?" asked Albert.

"His name was Ben Cowles. I know because they found him: the cops did. And Cowles didn't go peacefully. There was a shootout a few hours later. Cowles was shot in the chest and neck. He survived, but was paralyzed from the neck down. He's been in a special prison since then. Until tonight." She shivered. "But he's here now, and he's not crippled, he's strong and nasty as I remember him. And he's back, because Cowles - a whole, healthy Cowles - is my worst fear.

"What about the computer words?" demanded Jason. "What about the crayon notes? Where do those fit in?"

"Don't you see?" asked Albert. "I bet that Sean was just the crack in the dam. The first."

"We all live with so much fear," said Lenore quietly.

Jason jerked as if shot. "That's what Hatty said. That everyone in this town lives in constant fear."

"She's right," said Albert decisively. "The entire world has gone insane. Wars, disease, terrorism, just getting from your house to your car in some cities is a life-threatening proposition. Fear isn't just a reality anymore, it's a basic requirement of our existence. The whole world cringes in terror at night, afraid that the monsters might come to get them."

"And here it's more than that," added Lenore, nodding.

Albert smiled shyly at her. "Sean was the first, making the monster in the basement real with the intensity of his fear. He was the crack in the dam, and now fear has reached some kind of critical mass. And it's coming for all of us."

"But what about the bodies?" said Lenore. "Why did they all disappear?"

"They didn't," said Albert, with the air of someone about to deliver a coup de grace. "We disappeared. This whole town."

Jason didn't get it, and could see that Lenore was lost as well. Albert sighed. "Wait here," he said, and went outside before Jason could tell him not to. He was back in just a moment, however, holding his camcorder, leaving the door open behind him, the mist easily visible from where they stood.

Albert went to a small television on Hatty's desk, but instead of hooking the camcorder up to the device as Jason had expected he would, Albert turned on the TV. Snow was all the television showed. Albert aimed his camcorder at it and recorded the fuzzy image. Then he looked at Jason. "Is there a clock around?"

Jason pointed at a clock in the corner. Like all the others, it was blurred; unreadable. Albert taped it.

At that second, one of the shadowy wraiths appeared in the mist outside the open door, its horned head floating in the mist and reminding Jason of the deer he had killed. At the same instant as the phantom appeared, his walkie-talkie did its screaming trick. Albert turned around, whip-fast, and recorded the phantom.

The ghostly apparition faded back into the mist, but Albert looked supremely satisfied with himself. "Got it," he said.

He held up the camcorder to Jason and Lenore. "Now we have to go back to my house."

***

TWENTY THREE

***

Albert stood in front of his house and wondered if he would ever have a home again. A house was just brick and steel and wood. A home was a place you were safe.

By that definition, he suspected he would be homeless for a very long time.

The bay window that he had sat in for so many hours, reading comics or looking at his newest gadget in the bright sunlight it afforded was still gone, smashed to pieces by a crazy deer that had killed Mr. Jones. But the deer and Mr. Jones were both gone now.

He was not surprised; this is what had happened so many times over the millennia. The world was a big place, he knew; big enough that you could never find out about everything, including the huge disappearances that he theorized had been going on since the dawn of time. Only a few were known, but he suspected that many more had happened.

Fear was, after all, a contagious disease.

He looked at Miss Harris. She was a total rock-solid babe, he had realized earlier, and tried to steal a glance or two whenever she wasn’t looking. Who would have known that the third grade teacher had such a great bod? Why did she wear all that stupid gray? He supposed it was because of her experience with that man, Cowles, whoever he was, but still…even if something bad happened to you, that was no reason to not be good looking. Albert knew that he would gladly have suffered a thousand near-death experiences to look just half as good as Miss Harris did.

But that was just a pipe dream. He was who he was: Albert, super-nerd and uber-geek. He’d never be popular, never even really accepted. Miss Harris and Sheriff Meeks were treating him okay, but he knew that was mostly because he had something they wanted: information. Without knowing what he did, he doubted they would have saddled themselves with a fat tub of lard like him.

He knew that they didn’t like him; knew they couldn’t like him. But he still reveled in the fact that, finally, someone was listening to him.

He pointed at the destroyed window. "What I thought," he said.

"But why?" asked Lenore. "I still don’t understand why they disappeared."

"That’s not the right question," said Albert.

"What is?"

Albert smiled at her. Rock-solid babe. "The right question is why did we see Mr. Jones die? Why him specifically, and Ox, and Miss Hatty, and Sarah? Why did we see what happened to them, but not see what happened to everyone else?"

He waited for a moment. Surprisingly, it was Sheriff Meeks – whom Albert had always thought to be a bit slow in the head, people who talked as little as the sheriff did were generally either slow or shy – who came up with the answer.

"It’s because we knew," said Sheriff Meeks.

Albert nodded. "We knew what they feared," he said. "So we saw how they died. Because whatever is doing this…"

"…wants us to know what’s coming," said Miss Harris.

Albert nodded, then felt himself grow a bit downcast. "But why it wants us to know…that I haven’t figured out yet."

Again, Sheriff Meeks surprised him. "Time slows down," said the sheriff.

"What?" said Albert.

"I remember –" began the sheriff, then stopped himself from saying something. A second later, he said, "The worst part of fear is knowing what’s going to happen, and not being able to stop it."

"And being alone while it happens," added Lenore.

Albert nodded. "Like we are," he said. He again felt the crushing loneliness that had always followed him, the despair of knowing that no one would or could ever really love him. He nodded curtly, suddenly anxious to again prove his worth to the sheriff and Miss Harris so they wouldn’t ditch him out here.

He went inside his house.

***

Jason felt himself grow cold as he realized what fear did. He remembered The Dream, and the reality behind it; remembered how in every instance time slowed so that he couldn’t stop the shots, couldn’t stop the sick bastard from gunning down Elizabeth and Aaron.

If he’d only gotten there in time, they wouldn’t be gone right now.

It was his fault. They were gone and it was his fault.

He pushed that thought away as they entered the basement. Albert – he was a good kid, one that deserved better than he’d been given in life – hooked up his camcorder to some of the editing equipment he had in the basement and hit several buttons.

A large computer screen lit up. Haunting images flashed: the clocktower hands, blurred too fast. The flash of the ghost that had wandered past the Sheriff’s station in the mist, strange points on its head. The shriek of Jason’s own walkie-talkie.

Albert hit another button, and this time the scene appeared in slow motion. The clock reappeared, still moving fast, but this time clear enough to see that it was moving forward. The shape of the wraith in the mist, moving slower and appearing more solid, but still unrecognizable. The feedback of the walkie-talkie, lower pitched but still sounding like a fork scraping across plates.

Albert typed a bit, and this time the screen showed the clock in super slow motion. It appeared to be moving normally.

"So that’s why all the clocks seemed blurred?" Jason said.

The kid nodded. "The digital clocks were all moving too fast to see. Or better said, we were moving too slow to see them continue to move normally."

"What about the ghosts?" asked Lenore, and Jason nodded. What were they?

Albert clicked a mouse and the scene jumped ahead, to the spot where the ghost walked by. Only in slow motion it wasn’t a ghost.

Jason gaped.

It was a cop. The "horns" were now visible as the points on the officer’s hat. A gas mask was slung around his neck, and the goggles reminded Jason of the large eyes of the phantoms that he had glimpsed from time to time.

Albert stopped the playback with the officer frozen on the screen. "What do you want to bet that on the last day of the Harappan civilization everyone was scared shitless? War, famine, destruction, all the things we are afraid of today. It got to be too much, and their fears came alive to them. To us."

Albert clicked the mouse again and the playback continued. The cop raised his walkie-talkie and Jason suddenly realized why his own device had screeched so often when the "ghosts" had passed nearby: he was picking up on the transmissions of the cops’ walkie-talkies.

"No good," the cop said in a weird voice that Jason recognized was an effect of the time slowdown. "No one in the Sheriff’s station, either. It’s like the whole town just…disappeared."

"We disappeared," said Albert excitedly. "Not them, us. All those phantoms are probably cops, national guardsmen, people come to find out what happened to our town. Because we haven’t completely disappeared. We’re just moving slower than they are, in some parallel universe that just barely touches ours…a place existing solely through our fears."

"I still don’t understand why we would be moving so slow," said Lenore.

Jason cringed internally, remembering the night of the shooting. He had run and re-run the distance a million times in his mind, and each time he was moving too slow. Too slow. Aloud, he said, "Because fear slows down time for us. Anticipation stretches it out."

"And fear lives in that environment, in that place of slow-time," Albert said. "So our time slows down, which means that real time – the rest of the world’s time – passes faster than we can keep up. To them, we disappear."

"Until we die," said Lenore. "Then I bet we reappear to them. That’s why the ghosts congregate around the dead bodies: it’s the cops, investigating a body they’ve found; probably one that just appeared out of nowhere."

A thought struck Jason, and he grew coldly angry. "Then why am I here?" he demanded.

"Because of whatever you fear," said Albert.

"There’s nothing I’m afraid of," said Jason.

"There must be something," said Lenore. "Everyone’s afraid of something." Looking sad, as though she pitied him, the schoolteacher reached out to touch his arm.

Jason wheeled on her. "There’s nothing!" he almost shouted. He pulled something from his pocket: the shining bullet that he always kept there; the bullet he had almost used to blow his own brains out before this had all started. "When all you’ve got left is the bullet you made from the ones that killed everything you ever loved…." His voice trailed off and he felt his eyes glistening. "There’s nothing left to fear when that happens."

Lenore tried to hold his hand. "Sheriff, I’m so sorry."

"Sorry won’t bring them back!" he shouted, throwing her hand off his. Then he wheeled on Albert. "And you, kid: if this is powered by fear, then where’s your fear?" Without waiting for an answer he unplugged the camcorder. "This is crazy. You’re crazy."

Albert’s face went white, but Jason didn’t care. All he could think about was his family, lost forever. He had nothing to fear, because only the living had things to lose, and he had left their ranks years ago.

The boy was mumbling something, clearly trying to come up with words that would help, but Lenore said sharply, "Just leave him alone for a second, Albert." Her worry for Jason was clear on her face.

Albert backed away. Then he screamed.

Jason snapped out of his self-pity instantly, turning to see what new horror could be coming for them. And saw himself.

What? he thought. But it was true: he saw a vision of himself emerging from the shadows. It grabbed Albert and yanked him toward the stairwell. Jason blinked, trying to fathom what was going on. Before he could interpret the strange vision he was seeing, another Lenore stepped out of the shadows, too. Both doppelgangers converged on Albert.

The boy screamed. "No! No!"

Jason went to help him, and felt Lenore close behind. But before they could take more than a few steps, the lights went out, plunging everything into darkness. Albert was still screaming, and Jason could barely make out the shadowed figures of his and Lenore’s twins yanking the struggling kid up the stairs. He ran after them, up the stairs and out into the foyer, but the shadow versions of himself and Lenore were too fast. They yanked Albert out of the house and the door slammed shut behind them.

The mist writhed outside the broken bay window. "No, no, nooooooooooooo!" Albert was screaming. "Don’t do it! Don’t do it, I swear I didn’t mean to do anything, I –"

And then the screams ceased with a cry and a wet gurgle as of a throat being cut. The mist withdrew slightly. Jason got ready to jump out the bay window, but felt a light hand on his arm. It was Lenore. She was crying.

"Don’t bother," she said. "He’s gone."

"How do you know?" demanded Jason. "How can you be sure?"

"Because it was his fear," she answered. "His fear came to get him."

Jason looked out the window. "What fear? What was his fear?"

"That everyone was out to get him. So when we were both angry at him down there…."

"It killed him," said Jason, finishing her thought.

She shook her head. "We killed him."

Jason realized how close to tears she was. "No," he said. "Whatever did this may have looked like us, but it wasn’t me." He took her hand in his. "And it wasn’t you, either, okay?"

Lenore jumped as a phantom passed by the window. Jason laughed wryly. "Don’t worry, he won’t hurt you. It’s just a cop."

The wind billowed, driving some of the mist into the house. Then it withdrew, leaving something behind. A note. Crayon.

yoU R NEXT

Lenore instantly began to shake with fear. "He’s here," she whispered. "Cowles is here."

Jason looked out the window again. The mist roiled and rolled angrily. "No, he’s not," he said, trying to reassure Lenore though he did not feel very safe or certain himself.

"He’s here," she insisted. "He’s coming."

"It’s just fear," said Jason, and felt bitterness rise up inside him. He had no fear. Nothing to live for, nothing to lose. "Fear is just like everything else," he continued. "It dies if you let it." He couldn’t hide the bitterness in his words, even as he tried to impart a measure of hope to Lenore.

"I want to live, Jason," said Lenore, her gaze whipping back and forth between his face and the mist outside. "He’s here, he’ll find me, he’ll finish me this time."

"No, he won’t," said Jason.

"He will," she insisted.

"No, he won’t," he said again. "I won’t let him." And as he said that, the words bloomed inside him. He did have something to live for, after all. He gathered Lenore into his arms and held her tightly. "I won’t let him."

He felt Lenore go rigid in his embrace for a moment, then she relaxed and melted into him. They gave one another what solace could be given in this terror, and Jason felt life return in some small measure to his heart.

Then the moment ended as Lenore screamed.

Jason looked over. Out the bay window. Cowles’ face was in the darkness nearby. He was smiling.

The mist billowed, hiding him.

But he was out there now. Waiting.

***

TWENTY FOUR

***

Jason drew his gun and aimed it out the window. He pushed Lenore behind him, shielding her from her fear as best he could.

But it was no use. The force that powered Cowles’ existence did not center on him, it centered on Lenore. So when she moved behind Jason, the thug appeared there suddenly, grabbing her away and then yanking her out into the mist before Jason could react. He wanted to shoot the man, but the struggling form of Lenore was in the way and he didn’t want to hit her.

So he leapt out the window after them, running headfirst into the mist that had thickened even further. He could hear Lenore screaming, an aural beacon in the fog that he followed as rapidly as he could.

He saw shadows all around, but no Lenore. Then…there! A kicking foot, reminiscent of another kicking foot, dragged into an alley.

Jason threw off the cobwebs of memory and pursued Lenore and her kidnapper.

"Help, Jason!" screamed Lenore. "Hel –" And then her voice cut off and she was silent.

Jason had no time to despair; no time to think what he could do. In the instant that Lenore went silent, a pair of shadows moved out of the mist. Only these were not the police or guardsmen who were patrolling the empty town of Rising. It was a woman and her child, a mother and her son.

They were beautiful.

"Elizabeth," he said. "Aaron."

He reached out a trembling hand and touched his wife’s face, her lovely face. "We’re here, Jason," she said.

"Hi, Daddy," said Aaron.

It was too much. All thoughts of Lenore fled in an instant as he engulfed his family in an embrace. He smiled, lost in his wife’s loving eyes, then tousled his son’s hair.

"I’m sorry," he said. "I’m so sorry."

Elizabeth shook her head. "Shh. It’s all right, sweetheart."

She kissed him, long and deep…and then Jason pulled away. He looked at her deeply and said the hardest words he had ever said: "You’re not real."

"We could be," said Aaron, and the little boy’s voice, while still Aaron’s, now carried an undertone of madness and despair. A voice from Hell that tried to masquerade as a small piece of Heaven.

And why not? thought Jason. Why shouldn’t I get comfort in this fashion. It’s more than I deserve, for letting them die.

"Please, Daddy," said Aaron, and reached out to touch Jason’s arm with a small hand that was half-human, half-monster. A gnarled hybrid of innocence and destructive evil that flickered before Jason’s eyes, as though trying to decide whether to appear as salvation or damnation.

Lenore screamed in the distance, barely audible.

Jason left his wife’s embrace and turned to the sound. He stepped away from the ghosts of his past.

"Don’t," shouted Elizabeth – or the thing that Elizabeth had been.

Jason shut his eyes. He kept moving away.

"Daddy!" shouted Aaron. It was too much. Jason looked back at his family, weeping openly.

The mist billowed around them, strange and deadly.

Jason saw a hand push out of the mist: a gun, pointed at the back of Elizabeth’s head.

No, he thought. I never saw it happen, not even in The Dream, not ever, please, God, don’t let me see it happen.

"Save us," said Elizabeth. "You can save us. You just have to let go."

"Don’t let me die, Daddy," said Aaron.

Jason closed his eyes. "You’re already dead," he said. "And I have to save Lenore."

He turned away. Two shots rang out. Jason fell to his knees. "No!" he screamed, and all the terror and anger and anguish and loneliness of the past years were packed into the scream. It was so loud that his voice grew hoarse and raw and he could only sustain it for a few seconds. A few seconds of eternal hell, reliving his family’s death again.

And perhaps worst of all, Lenore was no longer screaming. She was gone.

***

TWENTY FIVE

***

Lenore had screamed as long as she could, but finally Cowles – or the demon that was pretending to be Cowles – hit her on the head with his gun and she fell insensible to the ground.

She woke in a dark place. Bound and gagged, and she couldn’t see where she was. She glanced around and then screamed around her gag as she saw Cowles, staring at her. The man pressed his knife on her cheek, and leered. "Don’t worry," he said. "I won’t kill you…yet." He licked his lips again with that strange, black, diseased tongue. "Like you all said, waiting is part of the fear. Knowing what will happen. It makes you…delicious."

***

Jason wandered, lost among the mist-wraiths that moved all about him. He reached out to touch one of the ghostly apparitions. The shadow passed right through him, or he passed right through it. One or the other.

"Lenore," he shouted. But it was no use. He had lost her.

A dark shape blossomed ahead of him, and he realized that it was the general store. The destroyed window and his truck were still there. One of the signs that had been affixed to the window flapped gently in the slight eddies of mist that whirled around the window.

It was a child’s sign. Written in black crayon.

go BaK to THE BegINIng

Jason stared at the note for a long moment, then realized what he had to do.

He got in his truck, praying it would still start. It did, and he pulled it out of the store with a screech of ruined gears and growls from a shredded chassis, then began to drive.

***

Cowles grinned at Lenore. He touched her bound arm. Caressed it. "Almost time, my beauty," he said, and again pressed his knife against her face. This time, however, he broke skin: she could feel a trickle of blood drip down her cheek.

"Almost time."

***

Jason rushed dangerously through the mist. He knew where he had to go, but did not know if he could find it.

Ahead of him, two shapes appeared in the mist. A small shape holding hands with a larger one. A voice whispered, "Please, Daddy."

Jason closed his eyes and drove right through the apparitions.

Two shots rang out.

He refused to be deterred, though, driving until he reached the house. Little Sean Rand’s house. The place where this had all started. The beginning.

He got out of his truck and went into the house, his gun drawn.

He knew he was in the right place: he could hear muffled screams somewhere.

He followed the sound into the kitchen.

***

Cowles licked the blood – her blood – off the knife. "I think you’re scared enough to eat," he said.

He fumbled with his pants.

Lenore screamed.

"No?" asked Cowles in mock surprise. "No loving, my dear?" He raised the knife high over his head. "That’s all right, I guess. You taste fine as you are."

And he plunged the knife down.

***

Jason rushed down the stairs in time to see Cowles stab at Lenore with the large knife he held.

"No!" screamed Jason, and shot. Cowles jerked once, the knife missing Lenore and embedding itself harmlessly on the wooden work bench he had tied Lenore to.

Cowles, bleeding but still smiling, pulled the knife free and raised it to again attempt to skewer Lenore.

This time Jason took no chances. He emptied almost his entire clip into the rapist’s body, the demon’s body. "You…can’t…have her!" he shouted. Cowles jerked and jittered, a marionette with cut strings.

The madman took a step toward Jason. Another. He held the knife high.

"I will have her," said Cowles.

"No," said Jason, and shot again. The man fell. Jason went and stood over him, then fired one more time, point blank into the rapist’s face. "I won’t let you," he said as the clip popped, the last bullet spent.

Jason pulled his pocket knife from his belt. Lenore was shaking in clear terror at how close she had come to dying, shaking her head in denial.

"It’s okay," said Jason as he sliced off her cords. "It’s okay, you’re safe now." He removed her gag. She was still shaking her head.

"No," she finally managed as soon as the gag was off.

"It’s okay," Jason repeated. "I got him this time."

"No," said Lenore, and looked at him with shining eyes. "You can’t kill my fear."

And as soon as she said that, Jason heard Cowles rise up again behind him. Jason spun and shot, but the gun simply clicked on a dry chamber.

"Out of bullets?" said Cowles in mock pity. "So sad." And he stabbed Jason. Nothing fancy, just directly into his chest, an upward stab that reached through his body cavity and pierced Jason’s heart.

Jason had only a moment to be surprised before he fell.

***

TWENTY SIX

***

Lenore watched Jason fall and screamed. Then she screamed again as the stricken sheriff grabbed at her leg from where he had fallen.

"Run," gasped Jason, then closed his eyes and was silent.

Cowles again licked the blood from his knife. Lenore rushed past him, screaming, and the demon laughed. "Run all you like, sweetheart." She turned in time to see Cowles stab Jason again, then kick him hard. Jason’s blood spilled, mingling with the bloodstains that were already on the floor. It must be Sean Rand’s house, she realized with terror. This was where the monster was born.

Lenore ran up the stairs and out of the house, into the mist, crying.

Then she stopped and looked back. The mist eddied, allowing her to see the house clearly for a moment. It was dark and ominous, the power that had been born of a child’s fear infecting the happy place like a malignant tumor.

Lenore squared her shoulders…and went back in. Jason was still down there. Dead, perhaps, but still down there.

She went in, and went down into the basement. Back into Hell.

Cowles was not there. Jason was, though, his mouth bubbling blood as he tried wretchedly to breath. His life was ebbing, his wounds clearly fatal.

"Go," whispered Jason when he saw her. She shook her head.

The sheriff’s eyes closed. She wept.

"So touching," said Cowles, and she spun to see the rapist standing at the foot of the stairs behind her. He flicked an imaginary tear from his eye. "True love conquers all," he said. Then he glanced at Jason’s still form. "Or maybe not."

He touched his crotch, massaging it, and Lenore felt like vomiting. But she didn’t. She held herself back from the precipice of panic into which she wanted to throw herself.

She reached down. Took Jason’s gun from his slack fingers. And she faced her fear.

She tried to raise the gun with trembling hands. The rapist laughed, and as he did his skin went slightly transparent. She caught a glimpse of something reptilian and vile and knew that to be raped by this creature would be far worse than anything she had ever imagined possible. She would be violated not by a human who had lost his humanity, but by a demon that had never had such experience at all.

Then the laugh ended, and Cowles was a man again.

Lenore felt like the gun weighed a thousand pounds. She couldn’t hold it up. She lowered the barrel, and Cowles laughed that hideous, mutated laugh of his. "You can’t do it," he chuckled. "Too afraid. Besides, even if you could," and here he gestured at the gun Lenore held, "no bullets."

Lenore closed her eyes, trembling, waiting for the end to come. She felt Cowles grasp her hand.

But wait! It wasn’t Cowles, it was Jason! She looked down and saw the sheriff put something in her hand. It was the bullet. The golden bullet that he had shown her and Albert earlier: the one that was the remains of the bullets that had killed the sheriff’s family.

She loaded it quickly. She had taken some gun training after her first encounter with Cowles, and though she had never completed the course, she still remembered how to load and chamber the bullet.

She looked back at Cowles. The man was no longer smiling. Something was different.

Lenore aimed the gun at her fear. And she smiled.

"No," whispered Cowles.

"You don’t scare me," she said with disgust. And pulled the trigger.

Light speared out of Cowles as the bullet hit him. He bled, but it was not blood that seeped from the wound. Rather, he oozed light. He fell to the ground, and as he fell Lenore once again glimpsed the creature beneath Cowles; the demon of her fear.

This time, she knew, Cowles would not miraculously resurrect. He was gone.

She threw the gun away and leaned down to Jason. She put his head in her lap and brushed the blood away from his lips. "Don’t leave me," she said.

Jason’s eyes opened. Just a crack, but even as they dimmed Lenore could see that something about the sheriff was different. Something had changed.

He was happy.

"Gotta go," said Jason.

He closed his eyes.

Lenore wept.

And Jason died.

***

TWENTY SEVEN

***

Jason opened his eyes.

He was in the basement still. But Lenore was gone. So was the blood that had been all over the basement just a moment ago. Cowles had disappeared. All was as it had been before any of this nightmare had begun.

But though Lenore and Cowles were gone, Jason was not alone.

Elizabeth and Aaron stood before him.

Jason’s mouth clenched. "You’re not real," he said.

"This time," responded Elizabeth, "we are."

And Jason knew it was true; could tell just by looking at them.

He held his family in his arms.

Dying had been worth it.

He broke down crying, huge sobs that came from deep within him, from a well of feeling that he had covered over on the day that he had buried his wife and son.

"What is it, my love?" asked his wife tenderly. Then, with an impish grin, she asked, "Are you still worried that I’m having that affair with the gardener?"

Jason laughed through his tears, then said, "My fear. It wasn’t losing you. It was dying…and not finding you there waiting for me."

Elizabeth kissed his cheek and held his hand to her heart. "Some things, even fear cannot steal," she said.

Jason smiled and looked down at his son. The boy was still holding the pad and black crayon that he had held on his last day of life. Comprehension dawned in Jason. "The notes…" he said.

Aaaron smiled that beautiful grin of his. "I drawed you letters, Daddy. Drawed everyone letters. Did you like them?"

Jason smiled and hugged his son. "We helped you as much as we could," said Elizabeth. "Sent you the messages, led you to the truth."

"And it worked!" shouted Aaron gleefully.

"Yes, sweetie," said Elizabeth to their boy. "It did." She turned back to Jason. "You saved Lenore. And in so doing, you saved yourself."

She stepped away from Jason then, drawing Aaron with her. Jason reached for them and said, "No, don’t go."

"We have to, Jason," said his wife. "But we’ll be waiting. Have no fear of that."

She smiled, then disappeared. At the same time, Jason cried out as one of the wraiths appeared before him. Then he composed himself as the wraith changed, morphing into someone familiar.

Lenore, he thought, and smiled. He was resting in her lap.

"Don’t go," she was murmuring. "Please don’t go. Don’t go, Sheriff."

He tried to say something, but it only came out as a whisper. Still, it was enough for hope and shock to bloom in Lenore’s eyes.

"What?" she said.

"It’s Jason," he repeated. "Not Sheriff. Just Jason."

Lenore gasped. "You were dead," she said. "You stopped breathing."

"It wasn't time for me to go after all," he whispered. "Don't be afraid of that."

And Lenore laughed and smiled and hugged him.

Jason caught sight of a clock on the corner of the basement.

It was tick-tick-ticking slowly, steadily. The minute and hour hands were visible.

Time had been refound.

He hugged Lenore.

And neither of them was afraid to hold the other.

And don't miss Michaelbrent Collings' newest thriller Perdition...

PERDITION

***

CHAPTER 1

***

The dreams, when they came, were always terrifying.

Usually Benjamin Dirkson slept peacefully and well. But occasionally – just often enough that he approached each night not with full-blown dread, but with a vague sense of unease – he would toss and turn, and awake exhausted. As though he had been running a marathon in his sleep.

He was not chased in the dream. No, he was not even a participant in it, near as he could remember. Rather, he was a mere observer, a spectral wraith watching from afar as the events of the dream unfolded before him.

First was the cross. It was the cross from his father's church. His father, Danny Dirkson, was a pastor for a small congregation in the town of Brookton, PA, pop. 32,014. Nothing fancy, just enough people to make Sundays meaningful. Occasionally there would be an itinerant preacher that his father would invite to come and preach, and the novelty would swell the ranks of the congregation, but usually there were only between a hundred and a hundred fifty participants in the weekly services.

In spite of the relative paucity of the turnout, however, the church was well-appointed. It was a beautifully constructed house of worship, two stories high. Inside the decorations were luxurious, with everything outfitted in dark mahogany and deep, polished brass. Ben had asked his father once how he could afford to outfit his church so stylishly, but all his father did was smile discreetly and say, "The Lord provides for His servants," with a twinkle in his blue eyes.

And of all the decorations and trimmings, none was so well-constructed or beautifully appointed as the cross that hung from the wall at the front of the church, directly behind the podium from which Ben's father delivered his sermons each Sunday.

It was not that the cross was showy or ostentatious in any way. There was no painstakingly rendered Christus on it, hanging in bloody agony, mouth forever frozen in pain. Ben's father did not like such crosses. "What?" he had been known to say. "Do you think people want to stare at pain for an hour each Sunday? Not exactly the picture of triumph over death, that."

But the cross, in spite of its lack of "flair," was undeniably beautiful. It was made of oak, thick heavy beams that were affixed seamlessly together at the middle. The carpenter who had designed and created the cross had eschewed the traditional right angles, preferring to allow the natural warp and weave of the wood to shine through. The result was a cross that did not stand straight and tall, but rather appeared to almost bow under its own weight. A fitting symbol for the man who had born the weight of the world on His capable shoulders.

The cross was then polished to a sheen so bright that you could see the chapel lights reflected in it, as though seeing them through a glass darkly, as the scripture said. Again, fitting when one contemplated that no matter how close to God one came in this world, there would be an infinitude of knowledge of Him waiting to be discovered in the hereafter.

So the cross was both the central piece of the church, its great work of art, and highly distinctive. That was why it was so easy to recognize in Ben's dreams: surely there could be no other cross like it in the world.

But where in reality the cross stood true at the head of the congregation, brightly lit by the track lamps that Ben's father had installed to highlight the beautiful piece of divine art, in Ben's dream the cross hung somewhere deep, and dark, and secret.

Worst and most ominous of all, it hung upside down in his dreams. The darkly polished gleam of the inverted cross was still present, but it was a dim light, one that seemed not to be reflecting brightness so much as sucking it in, pulling it into the depths of the cross like some oaken black hole.

It frightened Ben. He could feel his stomach muscles clench, even in the dream – even knowing it was a dream – but could do nothing to stop looking at it. It was as though the cross not only pulled in light, but pulled in his gaze, making it impossible to look away. The subtle curve of the arms of the cross seemed to grow greater and greater as he watched, until gradually the arms of the cross turned in on themselves like the limbs of some great insect that had died.

Gradually, in his dream, the cross disappeared, and in its place appeared a man. But not a normal man. Again, though he was just an observer to the dream, Ben could tell that this man was something terrifying. His features were cloaked in darkness, as though a cloud had settled over him, preventing anything but the vague outline of a body to be visible. Sometimes the man was cloaked, other times he was so vague as to be nothing more than a specter in the dim recesses of the dream.

But always, whether cloaked or ghostly, the figure did the same thing. It reached out a hand toward Ben, as though in supplication, palm up as though reaching out for help.

And in that instant, the shadows parted. Light appeared from nowhere and everywhere, a flickering light that brought to mind the diaphanous glint of flame from a bonfire. The light parted the gloom that surrounded the figure. Not much, just enough to notice something on its hand, a mark. The mark itself was nothing too bizarre, just a strangely amorphous red birthmark that seemed to twitch and flit about in the flickering light of the invisible flames that illuminated this part of the dream. But in spite of the fact that there was nothing inherently dangerous about the mark – or the hand that reached out, for that matter – Ben could always feel his presence shrinking away from it, could feel his dream self pulling back, trying to run.

Of course, running was impossible. Futile to attempt, even, in the nowhere of the dream. There was nowhere to run, because nowhere was all around him, and surrounded him.

Still, he tried, tried to run as fast as his unlegs could carry him. But no matter how hard he ran, or how far in this strange place where distance and time stood meaningless and still, the strange figure maintained a constant distance from him; the strangely marked hand reached out plaintively.

Then the flame-light grew brighter, and suddenly the light was not coming from some unexplainable source, but was instead coming from flames and fire. All around him. And somehow, he knew, not just around him, but around everything. Subtly changing, where the dream at first felt like it was nowhere, now it felt as though it were everywhere. As though the entirety of reality were in his mind, in his dreamscape.

The flames flickered and waxed and waned, and in them he thought he could see – with what eyes, he knew not, since he was bodiless as any specter here – people, numberless multitudes, as many as the sands of the seas or the stars of the skies, reaching forth, reaching out. Unlike the strange figure, they were not reaching out in supplication, they were reaching out in agony, hands crooked and ashen, skin falling from the bones in sloughing sheets and leaving only bright white bone behind.

The world was burning, he knew. And not just burning, but being utterly razed to the ground, destroyed beyond hope of ever being rejuvenated. No primordial mass would remain from which life could once again grow. The land was burnt utterly, leaving behind not so much as a single microbe. The oceans boiled, purging them of all life and all possibility of ever living again.

The universe – at least, the universe as he knew it – ended in his dreams. Only he and the figure remained. And then he heard something. A child's voice, speaking in whispered tones.

But he could not hear the words. He knew that he knew them, knew that if he could only hear them clearly he would be able to speak along with them, as though they were from a song half-remembered, a tune from his youth. He felt compelled to speak the unknown words, to sing them aloud with the child, as though by doing so he might bring back the whole of creation from its fallen state of sunless ash.

But he could not. He never could. For in that instant, Ben Dirkson awoke.

Always he awoke the same way: bathed in a sweat that drenched the sheets around him, so wet that he could not return to sleep until he had gotten up and showered, so wet that when he did return to sleep he did not return to his bed, but rather slept out on the couch. His wife, Lillian, joked that she would never have to get mad and send him out to sleep on the couch as penance for any kind of marital transgression; he went voluntarily there at least one or two nights a month, so what would be the point?

And so it was that Ben woke this night, bathed in sweat, hoping against hope that he could speak the magical words that would somehow allow light and life to return to his world, but knowing in his heart that such was not going to occur.

He woke, and felt the sheets squish beneath him, utterly sopping with his sweat. Lillian, beside him, was now attuned enough to his nightmares that she half-awoke and said in a dream-drenched voice, "The dream?"

Ben nodded, then realized that there was no way that such a nod would tell anything to Lillian. The room they slept in was utterly dark. No nightlight brightened the space, not even a luminous clock could be seen. That was Lillian's idea. She thought perhaps if they slept in a place that verged on being a sensory deprivation chamber, it might increase Ben's chances of sleeping through the night – and her own, since she inevitably woke when he did.

But it hadn't helped. Indeed, he thought sometimes that it made things worse, because at least if there was a clock in the room when he woke up, he could look at it and see that the world had not, in fact, ended. That once out of the nowhere of his dream it was once again one or two or three in the morning, and that by extension there was a morning on its way, and the whole world had not been burned with the coming of the shadow-man of his dreams.

Still, even though Lillian could not see his nod, he was loathe to answer her. She was pregnant with their first child, and he knew that the pregnancy had not been easy on her. The first trimester had seen her throwing up every six hours like clockwork, and this trimester had been marked by sudden chills and sweats, as though the baby had a tiny hand on her internal thermostat and was vigorously shaking it periodically. As a result, Lillian got little sleep, tossing and turning uncomfortably even on those occasions when her husband was not struggling under his own sleep-related problems.

"You okay?" she asked again.

"Sure," he answered.

"Shower?" she said.

"Yes," he said.

He got out of bed and showered, and as he usually did after The Dream – for so he thought of it, not as just any dream, but as The Dream, the one dream, the dream that was the only dream that he could ever remember having in his almost thirty-three years – he went to the couch afterward.

The one consolation on nights where he had The Dream was that it only came once. He had never had it twice in the same night, so could at least look forward to several hours of blessed oblivion before the day began. It made falling asleep after The Dream that much easier.

But tonight, in spite of that fact, sleep eluded him. He tossed and turned on the worn couch, feeling the weave of the cushions scratching at his skin as though during The Dream he had been converted to the princess of fable, so sensitive that she could not sleep if even a pea was beneath the mattress.

He spun around for a good half hour before finally sitting up and turning on the television. Another first. He never watched television at night, reasoning that if you were trying to sleep, the last way to get that done would be to involve yourself in a show of some kind. Plus he had concluded some years before that there was nothing of value to be seen on television between the hours of midnight and five a.m. All that could be found were infomercials, women wearing far too little clothing for him to think about watching – he was happily married and tried to avoid such things, even when his wife wasn't sleeping mere feet away from him – and music videos.

So when he turned on the television, he wasn't too surprised to find that there was very little on. He finally settled for watching reruns of Happy Days on one of the cable channels, and absently stared as the Fonz walked around like the king of the world, as Richie tried to find a girl, as the Cunningham parents worked awkwardly but endearingly to keep their brood together and wholesome in the rose-colored reimagining of life in the nineteen fifties.

He stayed there until morning, watching old television shows that appeared and disappeared before his eyes without leaving so much as a single trace of their existence behind. He could have been watching anything and it would have left the same lack of impression. All he could see before his eyes was the specter, standing in front of a burning world. All he could hear was a child's voice, speaking in whispered, almost reverent tones that were so low he could not quite make out the words.

He sat, and tried not to think of the end of the universe. He thought of Lillian, and how lucky he had been to find her. At thirty years old in a family where the men had a tendency to marry extremely young, he had been verging on being a confirmed bachelor in his parents' and brothers' eyes when she had come into his life, much to the extreme pleasure of his family.

He had met her at church. She was a teacher, and had moved in mid-year to replace the second grade teacher at the local school. The second grade teacher had been a member of his father's congregation, and had died tragically only a few days before. The entire community had been reeling over the loss. Mrs. Bloom, a sprite lady in her late fifties, had seemed like the kind of person who would likely live forever or until the Second Coming of Jesus, whichever came first. She had blue hair. Not what Ben thought of as "old lady blue," but rather a vivid, sky-blue dye job that made her seem like some punk-rocking granny. The kids in her class loved it, and called her "Mrs. Blue" instead of Mrs. Bloom.

She had been teaching in the town for almost thirty years, almost as long as Ben had been alive. Indeed, she had been his second grade teacher, two decades and change before. But that changed on one Sunday afternoon when she went for her "daily constitutional": a walk around the mountains outside Brookton that she took every evening at sunset, rain or shine.

The day in question was a bright and sunny one, one of those days in early spring that serve to remind you that summer is only a glimmer away, a day when the sun didn't want to go to bed, but rather stayed up late and strong, giving light well into the seven o'clock hour.

She went for her walk...and didn't come back. Mrs. Blue's daughter, who was living with her mother while in the midst of a messy divorce from a man who could only be described as the town misfit, called the Sheriff after her mother didn't return on time. A few hours later the Sheriff – who technically didn't have to go looking for a full-grown woman after she'd been missing less than an hour, but who frankly didn't have much better to do in the quiet town of Brookton – found Mrs. Blue.

She had been murdered. There was no question. At first the people heard that she had been killed by a mountain lion or perhaps a pack of coyotes, but slowly the details came out and it turned out that Mrs. Blue had not died at the teeth of a wild animal, but at the hands of the wildest animal of all: man. She had been ripped open from throat to groin, her insides torn from her body in a display of mad strength that made those who had seen it shudder and grow pale for years after it happened. The viscera had been piled beside her head, then burned as her open eyes stared at the blue sky that matched her hair.

The murderer had ever been found. The popular theory was that it was some crazy from out of town, since if there was one thing that everyone agreed on, it was that no one in Brookton – not even Mrs. Blue's certifiable loser of a son-in-law – was sufficiently disturbed and angry to do something like this. The Sheriff, a good man but one who was desperately out of his league when it came to things like ritualistic murders, had called in the state police, but they had failed to find a single clue or piece of evidence that might lead them to the perpetrator of the heinous crime, and soon they were no longer a presence in Brookton.

So the community felt the loss of its second grade teacher keenly, for though Brookton was big enough that not everyone knew everyone else, it was still small enough that most people knew all of the teachers that gave instruction at Brookton El, and indeed a good portion of the people in the town had been in Mrs. Blue's class themselves.

But as so often happens in life, tragedy bore hopeful fruit, at least in Ben's case. Because when he met Mrs. Blue's replacement, he knew that he had just met one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen.

Not that they had an easy relationship from the beginning. Indeed, Ben put his foot so firmly in his mouth within two weeks of meeting her that he was fairly sure she would never deign to speak to him again, let alone consent to go on a date with him.

The first time he had seen her, she had appeared in his father's church a new congregant. He had not known at the time that she was Mrs. Blue's replacement, but had only known that she was beautiful, and graceful, entering the – to her – strange new place with assurance and a way of walking that brought to mind professional ballet dancers. She moved with ease, as though she was not so much walking into the chapel as flowing into it, like some kind of spritely spirit that had taken a break from Heaven but had still retained much of her angelic beauty.

Ben knew he had to speak to her, and approached her after services. She was already surrounded by a group of men who wanted to make her acquaintance – meaning they were sniffing around her like hungry dogs who have just spied a fresh steak that had providentially appeared in their midst – but Ben, as the son of the preacher, was able to take her elbow gently and offer to show her around the chapel and help her find her way to the Sunday School classes.

She nodded in thanks, and he asked her name. "Lillian. Lillian Emerson," she answered, and even in speaking she was graceful, and lovely, and desirable in a way that Ben had never before experienced. He spoke little as he helped her to her Sunday classes, but instead found himself lost in her beautiful eyes and in the wavy beauty of her long blond hair.

He didn't think much of her during the next week. Not that she didn't appear in his thoughts from time to time, but he was often engaged mentally. He was a writer, whose first two books had found enough success that he had been able to quit his first career – working as an accountant in one of the small firms that serviced most of Brookton come tax season – and still afford to keep his small apartment and maintain the Spartan living style to which he had become accustomed through the years as a hopeless bachelor.

Still, in between cranking out pages in his newest – and, he thought, best – novel, he found himself thinking of Lillian from time to time, and the thought never failed to bring a smile to his face. He resolved during the course of the week that he would ask her out come Sunday. Nothing major, just perhaps dinner at one of the nice Mom-and-Pop places that could be found in the center of town; maybe a walk around to show her some of the local sights.

That Sunday, however, she had failed to appear. He had felt depressed at this at first, until the doors opened and another beautiful woman walked in.

Brookton was large enough that new people were moving in and out fairly regularly, but his father's congregation was fairly stable. To have one great beauty appear was unusual. To have two in as many weeks was unheard of.

The new woman came and sat right in the pew directly in front of Ben, and he found it very difficult to concentrate on his father's sermon that week. He wondered if perhaps the disappearance of Lillian and her replacement by this new picture of loveliness was fate or divine intervention. Maybe he wasn't supposed to ask Lillian out. Maybe he was supposed to continue as a bachelor, fulfilling his parents' worst nightmares.

Or maybe he was supposed to ask this new girl out.

He was still pondering the question when the sermon ended, still thinking on it during the closing hymn, still ruminating about it as the benediction was spoken. He really didn't know what to do.

The question was, to some extent, taken out of his hands, however, when the new woman in front of him turned and said, "Hi!" to him in a bright voice.

Ben almost turned around to see if she was talking to someone behind him. He wasn't a stunning example of manly good looks, he knew. He had a weak chin and had developed a bit of a belly during his time as an accountant. No woman's head would turn just because he walked into a room. And yet...and yet, here was a singularly lovely woman speaking to him, not waiting to be approached by anyone else, not running off to talk to any of the several quite good looking unmarried men who were in the congregation, but speaking to him.

"Uhh...," he managed after a moment. Scintillating conversation it was not, but it was the best he could manage through his surprise.

The woman smiled brightly. "How are you doing?" she asked, as though they were old friends who had known one another for years.

"Fine," he finally stammered. "Fine." And then, in case she hadn't heard it the first few times, he added one more "Fine" for good measure. Then he regained some modicum of control over himself and reached out a hand. "I'm Ben Dirkson," he said. "What's your name?"

All in all, he thought it was a pretty suave opening. He said it without stuttering too much or breaking out in sudden flop sweat, so he was going to count it as a win, in any event.

He was, therefore, quite surprised when the young woman's eyes beetled close together and she grew visibly upset. What had he done? he wondered. Usually women didn't decide that they actively disliked him. They might be disinterested, they might even be unaware of him, but at least they didn't actively show displeasure at his very presence. So what had he done in the past three seconds to deserve the ire of this lady?

A moment later all was made clear as she said in dark tones, "My name? It's Lillian, the same as it was last week."

Ben blinked, confused. Lillian? This wasn't Lillian. Lillian had long, wavy hair. And this girl had tightly curled tresses that hugged her face closely. Sure, both of them had blue eyes, and now that he thought of it their smiles were very similar, and not only that but they had the same perfectly white teeth and –

Oh, Lord, no, he thought as he realized his mistake. He had been utterly thrown by the total change in hairstyle. How could he? How could he have made such an utterly boneheaded mistake? Not only that, how could he have made it to Lillian, who had clearly decided that she liked him at least enough to be civil to him at church, and maybe even would have consented to go on a date with him – though he recognized that as a long shot.

Not anymore, he knew. There was no way that she was going to forgive this trespass. Beautiful women expected – deserved – to be remembered. And he had committed the cardinal sin of forgetting what Lillian looked like. Or at least, he had committed the sin of being confused by the change in her hair. No way would she even speak to him after this, let alone agree to go out with him.

The moment worsened when he gasped in horror at his mistake. Unfortunately, a glob of spittle had been in his mouth at the time, and when he inhaled, it went down his trachea.

He gagged. Then he coughed. Again, normally not the kind of thing that a suave ladies' man would do, if not necessarily a social sin. However, the cough came so quickly and violently that he didn't have a chance to raise his hand to cover his mouth. He coughed right in Lillian's face.

Her eyes, which had been irritated, now grew disgusted as he unloaded the cough straight at her.

"What –?" she stuttered.

Before he could think of anything else to say, he blurted the one thing that he absolutely should not have said.

"Go out with me!"

Lillian looked confused again. No doubt because he had not so much asked it as hollered it; he sounded like a five year old asking for more birthday cake.

Again, Ben's heart sank. He had forgotten what she looked like. He had coughed in her face. He asked her out in a tone of voice that a drunk might use.

And she said yes.

He blinked, not merely surprised but actually flabbergasted. He had read that word in books, but had never before experienced what it actually meant to be in that strange state. He couldn't speak. His eyes bulged.

"Are you trying to hypnotize me?" she asked with a smile.

His eyes bulged still more.

Lillian laughed. It was a beautiful laugh, sweet and tinkling as a crystal bell sounding on a perfect spring day.

"Why?" he finally managed.

She stopped laughing and pursed her lips. And then, right there in the middle of the chapel, she shrugged and said, "Damned if I know. You had me at the cough."

They were married six months later.

Thinking of Lillian, of their introduction to one another and their courtship and subsequent life together, Ben Dirkson managed to finally drift off. Light was already filtering through the windows in the living room when he did, but at least he got a few minutes – maybe even an hour – of sleep before Lillian was shaking him gently.

"Poor baby," she cooed, and kissed his forehead. "Bad night?"

"Yeah," he answered. He looked at his wife. At least she looked rested. Though upon reflection he could not remember her ever looking less than radiant. Even when hunched over a toilet bowl puking her guts out, she was still far and away the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

He smiled and pulled her down for a kiss.

"Easy, Casanova," she finally said with a smile. "I let you sleep in, so we're running a bit late."

"Who cares?" he said with a lecherous growl. He kissed her again, and then let his hands drop to her breasts.

She took his wrists and pushed them down to his sides. "Later tonight," she promised. "You don't want to be late for church."

"Maybe just this once," he said in a half-pleading, half-hopeful voice.

"No," she answered, but she was smiling as she said it. She laughed. "God, I love you," she said.

"I love you," he said back. And meant it. She was his greatest treasure. Her and the baby she carried.

He stood and found that she had made breakfast while he slept. Pancakes and eggs stood waiting on the table for him. He ate while Lillian watched. She wasn't puking every couple of hours any more, but he had noted that she had a distinct lack of appetite in the morning, so the fact that she had made breakfast for him meant even more than it might have only six months ago.

After breakfast, he went to the bathroom. He voided his bladder, then looked in the mirror to see if he would need to shave or not. His family was, as a rule, fairly hairy, but he seemed to have been skipped by the Dirkson hirsutism. He could often go days – as much as a week – without shaving. And he probably would have gone longer were it not for the fact that at that point Lillian usually began complaining about his beard scratching her, his cue to make himself clean-shaven once more.

Darn, he thought as he realized that he would, indeed, need to shave.

He looked down at the bottom drawer that was attached to the cabinetry beneath the bathroom sink. It held his meager toiletries – electric razor, deodorant, brush, and so on. He found the electric razor and pulled it out. He thumbed it on to make sure it had enough of a charge – nothing worse than shaving with a half-charged razor – and then, satisfied, looked back at the mirror.

And screamed.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michaelbrent Collings is a lawyer, screenwriter, black-belt martial artist, father, husband, and has a killer backhand on the badminton court. He has written several other books, many of them bestsellers; has published dozens of articles on several continents; and is currently writing a number of television shows and movies.

He has a Facebook page, and if you search for "Michaelbrent" on Facebook you'll find him, guaranteed (like it or not, there is only one "Michaelbrent" in the whole world). Or, if you wish, you can follow him on Twitter by following mbcollings.

He also has a website and blog at michaelbrentcollings.com, and double dog dares you to check it out.

Michaelbrent resides in Los Angeles, California, with his wife, two kids, and several imaginary friends, all of whom are too cool to invite Michaelbrent to their parties.