The Island: Tales of Terror
Author: Dan Padavona
Date: 2014-09-02 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Short Stories
Description: For the first time ever, get all of horror author Dan Padavona's fiendish tales in one collection. From serial killers and vampires to deadly spiders on a deserted island, this terrifying collection will leave you afraid of the dark! "Spider Horror that leaves fang marks!" ___________________________________________________________________________ Collection Includes: The Island Treman Mills One Autumn Kane Grove Plus a free preview of Dark Vanishings!

Contents

Copyright Information

The Island

One Autumn in Kane Grove

Dark Vanishings

Keep Reading!

Author's Note

About the Author

Copyright Information

Published by Dan Padavona

Visit our website at www.danpadavona.com

Copyright © 2014 by Dan Padavona

Photographs and Artwork copyright © 2014 by Dan Padavona

All Rights Reserved

Want even more horrific fun?

I would love to correspond directly with you. Each month I answer questions about my stories, give readers the scoop on my latest projects, review great books and movies, and run giveaways. Please join in on the fun by signing up at http://www.danpadavona.com/new-release-mailing-list/. You will only be contacted once or twice a month, and whenever a new book is about to be released. Your address will never be shared, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

The Island

The Little Princess exploded at high noon.

Ben’s eyes searched for his son as he ducked his head underwater to avoid the bits of shrapnel from the yacht raining down around him. His eyes opened to a sea of turquoise, schools of fish darting across the ocean floor like the shadow of migrating birds.

A million thoughts raced through his mind—sharks, the pull of the tide, ocean depth, his missing son. His eyes centered on a conglomeration of coral, beautiful yet sharp as knives. Coughing out the choking sea, he thrust his head out of the water, kicking his legs and spinning in a circle.

“Matt!”

A gray plume rose from the remnants of the yacht, bending over horizontally about a hundred yards off the ocean surface as it caught stronger winds above the water. Are we close enough to St. Kitts for someone to see the smoke? The smell of diesel was on the wind, mixing with sea salt and acrid smoke.

“Dad! Over here!”

Ben spun 180-degrees to see Matt swimming in his direction. At sixteen, Matt was already a much stronger swimmer than his father. He glided through the water, closing the distance between them.

“Slow down, Matt. Look out for reefs.”

Matt reached Ben, and they held onto each other, bobbing in the water like buoys.

“What did you say?”

“I said you need to look out for coral. It’s everywhere underneath us.”

Matt pointed toward a hill of lush greens and black rock jutting out of the sea in front of them and asked, “What island is that?”

“Don’t know. But we had better get to it quick. Just keep an eye out for coral.”

The island—no more than a hundred yards long and wide—had the appearance of a humpbacked, slumbering dinosaur. Ben and Matt swam more cautiously toward the island, putting distance between themselves and the burning remains of their sinking yacht. Reaching the shallows, they walked through gentle waves which lowered from chest-deep to thigh-high over several steps.

As Matt smiled at his father, Ben could see the doubt in his eyes.

Where are we, and how in the hell are we going to get back to civilization?

“How far do you think we are from the resort?”

“Can’t be too far.”

“We lost track of the shore over an hour ago.”

Ben didn’t know what he could say that would allay his son’s fear. Truth be told, he had the same concern. They could be ten or fifteen miles from civilization; and once the smoke plume dissipated, there would be no trace of their existence.

They emerged from the water amid gentle breakers onto a white sand shoreline choked with an overgrowth of palm trees. Something sharp and hard crawled over Ben’s foot, and he jumped. A crab the size of a fist lumbered toward the water.

“At least we won’t have trouble finding food,” Ben said, watching the crab submerge. “We should stay out of the sun while we figure out what we are going to do.”

Like a wet sponge, the July air encased the island in smothering humidity. It was no cooler under the shadows of the palms, which reached across the sand like claws, but at least they were out of the sun. Something rustled the leaves overhead, and Matt ducked as a white-tailed hawk plunged out of a palm as though it was an arrow shot from a bow. The hawk whistled over their heads and veered toward the shore where it swooped into the shallows, emerging with a fish wiggling in its talons.

“Better him than us,” Ben said with a forced laugh.

Through the palms he could see the crystal waters stretching endlessly toward the horizon. The main islands of the Lesser Antilles couldn’t be more than a dozen miles away but in which direction? Palm fronds rustled like distant laughter, the leaves put into motion by a thickening ocean breeze.

“How are we going to—”

“We’ll find a way. I promise.”

Ben pulled off his shoes and socks, leaving them in the sun to dry. Matt sat down and copied his father.

Behind them, the palms joined with lush ferns and a sea of green vegetation that rose in humps toward the island center. The terrain surface, charcoal-black and loamy, was visible only in scattered patches where the green did not smother it completely.

In the movies, Ben thought, the stranded saved themselves by spelling out a distress signal on the shore. He wondered if in the world’s history this methodology had ever worked outside of a Hollywood movie set. Still, he had to try something. He peered up into the rising jungle, its interior shadowed and forbidding. Cold reality began to dawn on him. The day had been ethereal—the idyllic beauty of the crystal seas, the explosion, and now this lunatic Robinson Crusoe scenario. It seemed as though he were walking in a dream, waiting for his wife to shake him awake. Incredibly, he was stranded on an unknown island with Matt, with no idea how to get back to civilization.

“Let’s gather as much wood and dry brush as we can find,” Ben said. “A lot of the wood might be damp so the sooner we can drag it into the sun to dry, the better.”

“You think we’re going to be here for a while, don’t you?”

Athletic, and almost as tall as his father, Matt seemed as though he had become an adult overnight; but now he had a look of anxiety in his eyes that reminded Ben that his son was still a boy.

“Somebody will find us, Matt. It’s not like we are hundreds of miles from shore. But we need to give ourselves every advantage that we can. That means making a fire, putting out a few distress signals, gathering rainwater, and finding food. If we stay calm, we’ll get out of this. Besides, when we don’t return for supper, your mother will have half the world searching for us.”

Ben thought about Marie, probably slick with tanning lotion and redolent of coconut oil on the white sand beach of St. Kitts. There would be a band playing, the musical tin of calypso drums filling the air as children splashed in the breakers. They should all be there now—Marie ogling the cabana boy who brought them lunchtime sandwiches but saving her desire for Ben that evening.

Instead he had taken the yacht too far offshore and lost track of the land when the navigation equipment oddly failed. After an hour of drifting without sight of civilization, eyeing the fuel gauge needle which pointed toward one-third of a tank remaining, he had panicked and plunged the yacht toward the island—the first land he had seen in what seemed an eternity. In his haste he had not seen the rocks ahead of the shallows, and he had rammed the Little Princess into a black mass of boulder just below the ocean surface. The stench of diesel fuel became overwhelming, and as Matt rushed to secure the wheel, Ben heard the wicked crackle of flames from below. Ben had just enough time to pull his son from the wheel and dive into the water before—

“Is it safe to go in there?” Matt asked, staring into the mass of palms which curled over at their tops like talons. Shadows spilled out toward them, massing at the jungle entry like water pushing against a failing dam.

“Think of the stories you will be able to tell everyone when you get back home—how you braved the jungle.”

Matt smiled uneasily and said, “There aren’t any…animals or anything in there, right?”

“Unless Noah dropped them off on a side trip, I highly doubt it.” But as Ben looked into the gloom, he heard something rustle in the undergrowth—probably just a bird, or the wind—and began to wonder if a tiger, lion, or even a dinosaur might be hunkered down within the darkness.

“But there could be snakes and stuff, right?”

“Maybe,” he said, not sure what types of reptiles inhabited the Lesser Antiles. He had seen his fair share of geckos, and those quick darting anoles that carnivals and pet stores always mistakenly labeled as chameleons. But he had no idea if poisonous snakes made their homes here. “Watch where you step, okay? Take it nice and slow.”

Ben led the way, Matt pressed close to him. Ben could feel the flora close behind him, as though a one-way gate had swung shut. When they had climbed the slope for a few minutes, he noticed that everything looked the same. Ferns with fronds that were almost as long as he was tall, stems as thick as a stout light post. He could feel Matt’s fingers grabbing at the back of his t-shirt, the boy’s feet slipping in the soggy loam.

There was slim quantity of fallen wood to be had, and much of what they found was unusable. Matt bent to pick up a thick branch, and the punky wood crumbled in his hand like wet sand. The boy jumped back as a thousand insects neither could identify scrambled out of the wood and into the underbrush. Black beetles, almost metallic looking, with bodies as large as a good-sized cockroach. Shelled bugs that rolled into balls, like the pill bugs Ben played with as a kid, but these bugs were bigger than peanut shells. Centipede-like things that scurried as fast as a hornet could fly.

“That’s odd,” Ben said.

“What?”

“Those are the first bugs I have seen. You would think we would have a seen a ton more by now. We’re in the tropics, after all.”

Then, about fifty feet up the slope among the tree tops, the glint of sun, and something glistening caught Ben’s eye. It was almost imperceptible within the dancing rays of the sun over the jungle canopy. As he stared, the wind caught the palm fronds and sent the glistening threads into motion—a spider’s web that was unlike any he had ever seen before. It canvassed the tops of three palms, stretching over the jungle canopy like a safety net.

“What do you see?”

Ben gave a start, his transfixed stare broken by Matt’s voice. “Nothing. Let’s keep moving.”

As he considered the number of spiders required to weave such a web, Ben shivered despite the stifling warmth, as though the back of his neck was touched by the cold breath of January.

Widely scattered hardwoods grew amid the army of green. The hardwoods that did survive were smothered by moss and lichen, as though under attack by the jungle. Parasitic plants took root in the bark, growing horizontally until they turned upward into the diffused light under the canopy.

It was under these trees that they found recently fallen branches that were dry enough for burning. Each gripping several branches under their arms, Ben led the way back down the slope. As they retraced their path through bent ferns, the vile stickiness of the jungle interior clung to their skin like a wet suit. Something indiscernible and disturbing also pressed upon them, as though the jungle might spring to life and consume them.

When they exited the jungle, sweat pouring off their bodies, Ben felt a strange disquiet as though he had passed through a graveyard. Now the unrelenting sun felt cleansing as the breeze thickened off the water.

Unlike in the movies, the white sand shore was compressed to no more than ten or fifteen yards before the jungle took over. There was just enough room to lay down a dozen pieces of wood and spell out a miniaturized S-O-S. Ben wondered about the tide. The gentle waves stopped within a few feet of the wood. A slight change in the tide would yank the wood into the sea where it would perish with the smoldering remnants of Little Princess.

Ben squinted into the sun. Neither of them had a watch, but based on the sun’s position he reasoned that it was almost 2 pm.

“Let’s see how far we can walk around this island. Maybe we can find something that we can use to build a shelter.”

“Or maybe we will see land from the other side of the island,” Matt said with renewed optimism in his eyes. Ben nodded in agreement but didn’t expect to see anything except an endless ocean.

The sand was hot in the blazing sunshine, and they took to walking through the shallows to cool their feet. Seashells dug into the soles of their feet, sometimes crumbling beneath them like broken glass. Shadows skittered and darted through the water as schools of fish and crabs wandered closer and retreated.

“If we sharpen a few sticks, do you think we can catch those fish?”

“Now you’re thinking,” Ben said, ruffling his son’s hair. “Matt, we are going to eat like kings. We have an ocean full of fish. And if we can’t catch them, we’ll just have to settle for crab for dinner. Now all we need to find is a french fry tree.” Matt laughed. “Seriously. We’ll be fine as long as we have shelter. We can’t be far from the islands. Someone will find us even if we have to rough it for a few days.”

As they circled the humpbacked island, nothing seemed to change but the position of the sun on their shoulders. Palms and ferns grew up the terrain toward the island center from all points along the shore. More hawks dive-bombed the shallows, snatching fish out of the water. Matt peered longingly across the rolling waters, searching for signs of land but finding only desolate seas.

Then a quarter of the way around the island, Ben stopped in his tracks.

A boat.

Matt had been looking across the water and had nearly walked right into the back of Ben. When he glanced up, he turned his eyes to his father. They looked again at the boat, unbelieving, as though they had found a glistening mirage of water in the middle of an endless desert. Then Matt grinned, and they darted toward the boat, shouting as they ran.

“Hello!”

“Is anyone there?”

“Help!”

“We’re stranded!”

The craft, a small motorboat, rocked to the tempo of the rhythmic waves. A thick, weathered rope tied the bow to the base of a palm bent over the waterline. By the look of the rope—barely frayed in the middle and tightly coiled over the majority of its length—Ben figured the boat had been here at least a few weeks but probably not much longer than that. A few inches of standing water covered the motorboat’s floor, evidence of passing thunderstorms. Bird guano covered the hull as though the boater had been attacked by pirates armed with white paint guns.

He cupped his hands around his mouth and called into the jungle. Matt yelled out, too, turning in a circle as though he expected to find a tourist in a bucket hat wading toward them out of the shallows. They continued for a few minutes, the sensation that something was wrong beginning to eat at Ben.

“Whoever was here, they are long gone. This boat hasn’t been driven in at least a week or two,” Ben said, pointing to the rainwater inside the boat.

“I wonder if he got lost like we did.”

Ben stuck his head inside the boat and saw the fuel gauge needle was a shade above the “E”.

“Or ran out of fuel. Seeing this boat is good news, though. That confirms what I said about us being close to civilization. It’s not just a coincidence that two boats got lost and found the same island.”

“Do you think the person might still be here? Maybe he found shelter up the hill.”

Ben grimaced. The last thing he wanted to do was climb up through that jungle again. Leaves rippled and swayed in the breeze, almost as if the jungle was taunting him. On cue with the laughing wind, a cauliflower tower of cumulus rose above the water several miles offshore. Its sides were crisp and white in the afternoon sunshine, appearing as a distant bomb blast. Already the underside of the cloud had grown black, as though night congregated there.

“Speaking of shelter, we had better figure out what we are going to do if it rains. We don’t want to be caught in the open in a lightning storm.”

Ben led Matt back into the overgrowth, pushing against the thick leaves and stalks to clear a path. The cloud continued to grow over the ocean; and as it rose to cloak the sun, Matt felt a cool shadow sweep down across his neck. He turned his head back to the shore as he walked, longingly watching the motorboat become smaller and smaller, until the jungle wrapped itself around him like a door slamming shut.

“Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“Whose boat do you think that is?”

“I don’t know. Could be a fisherman, an islander, or even a sightseer like us.”

“If he was stranded on the island, where is he now?”

Ben didn’t want to say what was really on his mind—that the guy was dead somewhere in the jungle, his body crawling with those black beetles. He pressed onward, racing against the building storm to find shelter.

Matt wrinkled his nose. The air inside the jungle was stagnant, the scent of chlorophyll overwhelming. There was another smell here, too: a smell of decay and death.

As he climbed up the slope, the damp, black humus under his feet kept slipping out from under him. He fell forward once, caught by a huge cup of fronds that made him feel as though he were a pearl trapped inside a giant clam. Ben pulled him up, and Matt looked back at the massive fronds, thinking that they might grow fangs and swallow him whole the next time he made a mistake.

A quarter of the way up the slope, Matt’s eye caught a glimpse of light, strangely heliographing in the dappled sunlight. The light seemed to come from nowhere and from everywhere. It glistened white, yellow, and orange in thin strands. The light bounced between two towering palms. He shivered, realizing the illusion was caused by a humongous spiderweb spanning at least twenty yards. Then, just before the overgrowth blocked his vision, he thought he saw something football-shaped hanging between the trees, suspended by invisible tethers like a magician’s trick. He told himself that it was just a piece of bark from the palms, broken off by the wind and stranded in the webbing; but it had sure looked like the dessicated remains of one of those hawks they kept seeing. But that was ridiculous. A spider couldn’t kill a hawk. Could it? He pressed closer to his father.

Ben could no longer tell any portion of the jungle apart from any other. In all directions was a sickly, green version of one of Grimm’s haunted forests. There were no pathways—only masses of thick stems, huge leaves, and blackness ahead. Sometimes they brushed against a stout stem, and water pooled within the fronds rained down on them. The water always felt slimy, as though it had coagulated with the jungle.

A thin vine appeared this far up the slope, snaking around fronds and stalks like a python. Ben wondered again about the dangers of poisonous snakes on an isolated island. It seemed unlikely, but in the foreboding darkness of the island jungle anything seemed possible. He began to look up with trepidation and step more carefully.

He could hear Matt breathing heavily, almost wheezing. The boy ran track and played basketball, but the suffocating humidity was taking its toll on him.

“Hey, let’s slow down a bit,” Ben said, again ruffling Matt’s hair, which felt like a wet mop in his hand. Matt bent over, hands on knees. His breathing didn’t sound right, almost asthmatic. “Maybe we should turn around and get back to the fresh air.”

“No,” Matt said, his breathing slowing. “I’m fine. We gotta find shelter, right?”

“Yeah, but we’re walking around blind. Tell you what, let’s cut a diagonal back to the right of where we started. We’ll cover more territory, and if worst comes to worst, we’ll hit shore.”

But as they turned to go, something scurried across the jungle floor several yards away. It had been large enough to shake stems and cause an impromptu shower from the upper leaves of the canopy.

“What was that?” Matt was watching the blackness into which the thing had crawled, wary that it might come back.

“Dunno. It was big, though. Probably a rat.”

“That wasn’t a rat. Besides, how would a rat get onto an island in the middle of the ocean?”

“Are you kidding? Those damn things are everywhere.”

But Ben was watching the gloom, too, chewing on his lip. His body tensed. He felt the urge to pull Matt back from the jungle where the thing had crawled. Jesus, I hope it was just a rat.

There came a rumble that sounded like a bowling ball rolling along a sky-length alley.

Thunder. They were running out of time.

Ben pulled Matt behind him and began to cut diagonally downslope. The way down was faster—almost too fast. The loose soil kept giving way. Ben and Matt each grabbed stalks and palm trunks to catch themselves. The sky, now a milky white overhead, began to reveal itself through the dense canopy as they descended the slope. The wind was picking up, too, a salty breeze that snaked its way through the fronds and cooled their skin. But Ben could not take comfort in the breeze, for he knew that it foretold of stormy weather, and they were still without shelter.

He strained to keep from screaming, panic locked behind his throat, fearing that his son would see it on his face. Here he was: trapped on an unknown island off the Lesser Antilles, preparing to die of a lightning strike that could just as easily kill him on Cape Cod or in some burg in Nebraska.

There was a silent tension in the air, like a coiled spring, and he thought he could smell ozone. Then lightning ripped across the sky, fiery fingers tearing a hole through building gray. He was counting the seconds in his head, knowing that a five second delay between lightning and thunder meant the strike was a mile away. Thunder rumbled before he reached four, rolling through the ground as though a volcano was about to erupt.

The panic was pushing past his throat now, rushing outward like a rancid, roiling vapor that was sure to destroy Matt’s confidence. The wind became a force, ripping leaves and sending the jungle into a frenzied dance. He felt his hair stand on end, and as he turned to yell for Matt to hit the ground, a blinding bolt of lightning struck the shore, followed immediately by an explosion of thunder that shook palms and caused the ground to buckle.

As Ben and Matt ducked under a pair of palms, the wind parted the leaves to reveal something different just ahead of their path. It appeared dark and depthless, as though a small portion of night had broken from the sky and fallen to this permanent jungle prison, where it lay stranded under the unrelenting sun. Ben could see Matt squinting his eyes, staring toward the unknown source of darkness. Without thinking, he grabbed Matt by the elbow and started forward.

Thunder pealed through the jungle, and Ben could feel, rather than see the lightning that spoked between two black clouds which had rushed over the island. The depthless hole drew nearer, and then it took form—a cave. As their eyes met, Ben had a wide grin on his face. How could he have been so lucky? He had found the perfect shelter hidden in the almost impenetrable jungle. Without another word, they sprinted toward the cave as the first huge, tropical raindrops splattered onto overhead fronds.

There were none of the rocks one might expect outside the entrance to a cave. In fact, as they ducked inside of the five-foot wide circular entrance, it seemed more a tunnel than a cave, as though a Jurassic era worm had burrowed into the side of the loamy hill. The light fell away a few yards ahead, and Ben realized uneasily that any sort of animal could be inside the tunnel just beyond their view. An animal with razors for claws and jaws that could bite through a leg bone. That was crazy, of course. There were no dangerous animals on these islands. But as he rested his back against the earthen sides of the tunnel, his eyes kept wandering toward the edge of darkness, a prickling fear running up his legs.

Rain was pouring in torrents across the tunnel opening, giving Ben the impression of standing behind a waterfall. The water roared as it cascaded over the tunnel, a vertical stream choked with bits of plant and clumps of black, runny earth.

“Good thing we found this cave. We almost got stuck in that,” Ben said, pointing to the deluge.

Matt eyes were watching the unmoving black as he said, “This doesn’t seem like any cave I ever heard of.” Caves, Matt knew, formed within soluble rocks, carved out over centuries by water. This tunnel appeared to be a burrow. As his eyes traveled over the dirt walls, he remembered the huge bugs from the jungle interior, and he shuddered.

Thunder bowled through the island interior again.

The outside air, redolent of ozone, salt water, and the soaked, fecund jungle floor, pushed into the tunnel as the wind rushed at them. When the cool raindrops splashed against their faces, they instinctively slid several yards deeper into the tunnel. The darkness did not recede as they moved toward its border. If anything it seemed to press closer, like a living thing. The earthen walls felt like cold, dead hands on their backs.

Matt was seated closest to the gloom, his shoulder almost butting up against it. Ben crouched over and moved around him, so that he was the first line of defense should anything rush out of the darkness at them. But as he put his foot down, icy fear gripped him—there was no ground under his foot.

Before he could catch his balance, Ben slid downward. Matt saw nothing in the blackness. Nothing except the faint ghost of his father, eyes wide, mouth locked in a silent scream, his face a witch mask. Matt reached for his father, but he was gone faster than his screaming voice could die against the earthen walls.

“Dad! Dad!”

Then silence. Dead silence.

Matt inched forward, careful not to drop over the unseen cliff. His heart was pounding, his head thrumming so hard he thought he might faint. He couldn’t see a thing. All about him, the air had taken on a horrible odor, like decaying animals. The blackness before him was palpable, like some gelatinous alien dimension that his father had vanished into. He thought that if he stuck his arm into the gloom, it would be enveloped in something wet and toxic.

There was a scream poised at his lips, yet Matt could not scream, for he was frozen where he stood, crippled by sensory overload. His father—vanished into the bowels of the earth. Himself—stranded with no idea where he was or if he would ever see another living soul.

He inched forward a little more, his feet sliding through loose soil that felt sticky, almost like walking on fly paper.

“D-Dad?”

And then something grabbed his ankle.

He screamed.

“It’s okay, Matt. It’s me.”

The relief that poured through Matt was so thorough that he nearly crumbled.

“I thought…thought you -”

“I slid down into the tunnel. It’s on a sharp diagonal. Too sharp for me to crawl out of on my own. I’ll need you to give me a hand.”

Matt bent down toward his father’s hand—the grip vise-tight around his ankle—toward where his father’s voice seemed to rise out of the earth. Just as he was about to grip his father’s wrist, he pulled his hand back as though a scorpion was poised to strike. A dark thought crossed his mind—what if that isn’t my father. What if my father is dead and the voice I hear is one of the devils that pulled him into that hole.

“C’mon, Matt. I can’t hold on much longer.”

Matt grasped his father’s wrist with both hands and pulled. As his feet dug into the soft earth, he could feel his father’s body struggling to pull out of the tunnel.

“A little further, Matt. Almost…”

Matt dug in harder, leaning back, feeling the veins in his neck tighten like wound springs. Then Ben was out of the tunnel, panting on the earthen floor, as thunder rolled from the ocean into the gloom.

Lightning flashed—three rapid strokes that lit the tunnel interior like a strobe light. Matt, looking past his father, fell backward into the murky light at the tunnel entrance. Ben saw Matt’s face turn chalk-white, his mouth hanging open as though he wanted to yell but had forgotten how to form words.

The three strobed flashes, snapshots of some amusement park haunted house ride come to life, left Matt without a firm grip on reality. He had seen…surely his eyes must have played tricks…no, he had seen a man—empty sockets for eyes, body dessicated as though something had drained the lifeblood out of him—cocooned to the tunnel wall beyond the drop off. A silken web stretched across his body, descending into the tunnel beyond his vision. The intricate pattern and the sheer size of the webbing were familiar to him. He had seen the same pattern enveloping the palms where the hawk had been wrapped like so much pigskin. And then he had seen the gaping hole in the dead man’s chest cavity, long, hairless legs rising out of the orifice like the demon fingers of a ghoul crawling out of an open grave.

“Matt! What is it?”

Matt was staring toward his father’s voice, seeing only darkness, praying that the lightning would not penetrate the tunnel interior again.

“Matt! Talk to me. What happened?”

“Get away from there, Dad.”

“What—”

“Get out of the tunnel!”

As Ben crawled toward the gray, a skittering sound came from the earthen ceiling. Something hissed behind him, like gas escaping. And then a spider, bigger than any spider Ben had ever believed could exist, shot down from the top of the tunnel on a nearly invisible strand of web. It was hairless like a black widow, as big as a softball, eight legs dancing maniacally as it descended.

Ben screamed in disgust and terror, trying to pull his arm away from the spider’s path. The spider was too fast. Fangs like daggers penetrated flesh on the top of Ben’s right hand. He whipped his arm, and the thing flew back into the darkness, hissing. Abruptly, Ben’s flesh felt as though acid were eating through it. A sharp, fiery pain shot up his arm, and his muscles spasmed.

“Dad! What was that thing?”

Matt pulled his father by the arm into the driving rain, no longer caring about the thunderstorm. Ben crawled on all fours out of the tunnel, his right arm shaking like the legs of a newborn pony. He turned to face the tunnel, the rain thrumming down on his head. Something hissed from within the darkness, and he darted back from the tunnel opening.

Matt grabbed his father’s right hand. Two deep incisions, already a sickly purple and pus-filled, marked where the spider had struck. Ben looked at his hand—which looked more like a clown’s hand now than a human’s—and averted his eyes.

“Jesus.”

“Was that thing…is it poisonous?”

“How the hell should I know?” Ben was breathing heavily as water ran in thin rivulets down his face. Then his eyes softened. “I’m sorry…sorry, Matt. Hell, I don’t even know what kind of spider that was.”

“How does your arm feel?”

“My arm?” Ben looked down his arm. A redness, almost like a fever rash, had spread from the base of his wrist to just shy of his elbow. “It…burns. Goddammit. It’s like my skin is on fire.”

Matt pulled his waterlogged t-shirt over his head; then he wrapped it tightly about itself and tied it around his father’s arm below the elbow.

“You think that will help?” Ben asked. Matt shook his head noncommittally. “In the tunnel…you saw something.”

The little blood that had returned to Matt’s face drained out again. He wanted to believe the lightning had fooled his eyes, that it had somehow evoked a waking nightmare out of him. His body shivering despite the oppressive humidity, he told his father what the lightning had revealed within the tunnel. Ben collapsed against the curved trunk of a palm.

“The boater,” Matt whispered.

“Yeah,” Ben said, eyes fixed on the blackened entrance.

Thunder roared once more, like a dinosaur resurrected. The storm sounded more distant now, the rain falling in smaller droplets. The eastern sky was black as night, while the western horizon was a volatile mixture of ragged, gray clouds and thin strands of sun vying for the ocean surface.

“The boat,” Matt said. “Could we use the firewood we gathered as oars?”

As he watched the first God rays penetrate the clouds to turn the western waters golden, Ben clutched his right arm above the elbow. “One piece of wood against the ocean? Not likely. Not that I would know, bud. It’s not like I ever tried to paddle across an ocean before.”

“At least we’d be off the island,” Matt said, looking warily back toward the tunnel.

Ben nodded. The spiders had added a whole new element of danger to the jungle. He would rather be anywhere but on the island once nightfall approached. But it was a hell of a risk. Once they were a hundred yards from shore, they would be at the whim of the ocean current. They could just as easily end up in the middle of the Atlantic, or fall off the edge of the earth, as find their way back to civilization.

“You know, there looked like there was a tiny bit of fuel left. Maybe enough to get us started and keep us going for five or ten minutes.”

“How are you going to start the engine? We don’t have the keys.”

“I bet I know where the keys are,” Ben said, staring intently into the tunnel. Matt’s eyes widened in realization.

“No way, Dad. You can’t go back in there.”

Ben thought if he could fashion a torch and find a way to ignite it, that he could get in and out of the tunnel quickly enough to avoid the spiders. As water poured off jungle leaves and cascaded onto the black, muddy earth, he knew there would be no easy way to get a fire started in this humidity.

Emerging from behind separating clouds, the sun swept in flaxen tones across the rhythmic sea, turning the water to liquid gold. The orb, taking an accelerating westward track, was a deeper orange than it had been prior to the rains—almost bloody. There were only a few hours of daylight remaining.

“Okay. I’ll have to find another way to start the engine.”

Ben led Matt through the dripping jungle toward the shoreline. The sun was strong above the canopy, but water spilled out of the leaves in buckets, making it seem as though they were walking through a cloudburst. Matt’s eyes kept drifting through the tangle of green, searching for more telltale webbing. Once he had seen something glistening among a set of squat palms, its edges flashing like a mirage as a strand of sunlight penetrated the canopy. Then his forward movement took him past, and the jungle swallowed the view.

As the shoreline materialized through the thick jungle border, Ben leaned on Matt for support, his head swimming in a murky dizziness that was not the result of heat exhaustion. Matt looked at him with concern etched on his face.

“It’s getting worse, isn’t it?”

“I’ll be fine. Just get me to that boat.”

Taking care to walk through the shallows, they stumbled along the shoreline, keeping several feet between them and the thick vegetation. As Matt and Ben continued southward, their shadows grew long, stretching across the shore until their shadows were consumed at the jungle’s edge. Palms, which individually might have appeared idyllic in another setting, curved like hulking monsters in sentry formation along the wilderness periphery, the dying sun bathing them in bloody tones. Heavy, skittering noises rose out from the jungle interior. The sounds seemed to be moving closer.

The boat had taken on an additional inch of water but otherwise seemed exactly as they had left it. Ben climbed into the craft on trembling legs, beginning to feel feverish. He could feel Matt’s eyes on him, but there was no time for worry. He had to think. If he could figure out how to hot-wire the boat, if the engine started, and if there was enough fuel to get them a few miles into the sea…

So many ifs. He bent low and yanked the key switch cover off.

As he studied the wiring, he thought about the trip out of St. Kitts. They had left westward, the sun on their backs. After they had become lost, Ben was sure the sun had generally been in his face or just off to his left as he had attempted to reverse course. That meant he was probably somewhere south and west of his desired target. Trying to envision a map of the islands, he believed a straight westward track would lead them into the middle of nowhere. A northeastward track had the highest potential to get them back to St. Kitts or one of the nearby islands. A north-northeast track would run them close to Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic if they were lucky. Straight south would run them into Venezuela, but that trip would take days, and they had no way to steer the boat once the motor died.

Steer the boat. Of course!

Ben looked behind him. A long paddle was attached to the interior side, so obvious that he was surprised that the oar hadn’t detached itself from the hull and smacked him on the ass. He bent his head back and laughed. Even if he couldn’t get the boat to start, he had an oar. Seeing what his father had centered his eyes on, Matt snatched the oar from the side of the boat.

“This will work, right?”

“Hell yes. It won’t be easy paddling through ocean waves, but we’ll make do.”

Ben studied the variegated spaghetti strands of colored wires, his right arm still burning from within as though he had been injected with jet fuel. At least his head was beginning to clear. As he fumbled with the wires, Matt was staring longingly at the oar and giving it a few practice strokes through the shallows. Multi-colored fish darted away from the oar, swimming away from shore as though fired from a slingshot. While his father continued to sift through the wires, Matt spotted a red, plastic cup floating in the back corner of the boat. The top of one side of the cup had broken off, leaving behind a jagged bottom jaw of a Halloween pumpkin’s grimace. The rest of the plastic was intact, so he busied himself bailing small amounts of water over the side of the boat.

As the sun accelerated toward the horizon, tall shadows began to creep across the shore. The shadows moved on the periphery of Matt’s vision, and he might not have given them attention had his mind not alerted him that something was out of place. With the sun coming in from the west, the only shadows on the truncated beach should have been their own. His head lifted, and he gasped. Black spiders, hairless with orange and red markings that burned in the dying light, crept out of the jungle. Some were the size of tarantulas; others were colossal—the size of the largest bird eater spiders he had seen behind glass at the zoo. And within the mass of black were two unthinkable, spindly nightmares the lengths of house cats, creeping toward the boat like generals leading the march.

“Dad—”

Ben heard the fear in his son’s voice at the same time that a hiss arose from the jungle’s edge. He raised his head from the wires to see the horror spreading across the sand in a sea of crimson and black. There were dozens upon dozens, perhaps hundreds. His eyes moved across the advancing army, spotting eight-legged monstrosities whose fangs were visible from halfway across the beach.

“They can’t reach us. They can’t swim,” Ben said, his words sounding more like a desperate hope than a statement of fact.

“Start the engine!”

“I can’t yet…I don’t know which—”

The words froze in Ben’s mouth at the sight of a spider the length of a sewer rat rearing up on its hind legs and jumping several feet across the water. It thudded against the side of the boat as though someone had fired a softball at the hull. Ben immediately grasped the rope knotted to the bow. He fumbled with the knot, seeing out of the corner of his eye the sand being overrun by throngs of spiders. Something heavier struck the hull.

Holding the oar like a weapon, Matt bent over the boat to witness a tangle of black legs rippling the water as a huge form was dragged under by the tide.

They were coming from everywhere now: descending out of palms, scurrying beneath ferns, darting out of the black jungle like soldiers breaking out of their camouflage. Still struggling to undo the taut knot, Ben stared in half-terror, half-amazement as dozens of spiders turned on each other, tearing one another apart as if to stake claim on the human targets in the boat. The beach was alive with the baleful hissing of the massing spiders.

From the outer hull came a vile scratching, like fingers clawing against the inside of a crypt. When Matt turned toward the sound, he saw two long, black, alien legs rising above the edge. Then the two legs were extended over the hull, gripping the interior. Fangs, dripping with a milky substance, appeared over the edge. The spider, at least a foot in length, was about to drop into the boat when Matt swung the oar. The impact felt solid, as though the oar had struck a large animal. The spider was strong, too. Not falling over the side, the spider slid several inches across the top of the hull and turned toward Matt, ready to spring. The oar struck again. The blow swept the spider off the ledge and into the salty Atlantic, where its legs thrashed and its body spasmed as the tide pulled it out to sea.

Two more thuds slammed against the side of the boat. The hissing had grown louder, as though live wires were writhing along the sand, spurting sparks into the failing daylight.

Ben had worked the knot loose enough to slip a finger into its center. He was pulling the knot free when a grapefruit-sized spider with fiery orange striations leaped upward and latched itself to his left arm. Fangs pierced skin, and Ben felt the pain of a hundred wasps stinging as one. As he tried to push it off with his right hand, he saw to his horror that it was reared back, preparing to launch itself at his face. In a moment frozen in time, he saw his own witch mask reflected in its eight eyes.

Matt was by Ben’s side immediately, swatting the spider off his father’s arm with the oar. Ben yanked the end of the rope through the knot, freeing the boat. As the rope was falling away, Ben noticed an elongated abomination—almost squid-like—had been climbing across the rope, its legs wrapped around the synthetic fibers. The thing hit the wet sand with a splatter, and it scurried angrily to its belly, preparing to leap at the boat.

Scratching sounds came from both sides of the boat’s exterior like a family of rats rustling through hollow walls. There were long, black legs—dozens upon dozens—appearing over the sides. Matt cocked back the oar just as the squid-like spider launched itself over the water’s edge onto the boy’s back. Fangs buried themselves into Matt’s shoulders—the thing biting, and biting, and biting again—rapidly turning his skin into something that looked like hamburger meat. Ben snatched the oar out of his son’s hands, having to forcibly pry the spider off his son’s shoulders. The sight of bits of his son’s flesh in the spider’s fangs caused Matt to gag.

As though sensing triumph, the black army swarmed over the sides of the boat. The hissing that arose from the beach almost sounded desperate, as though the gathering throng feared there would be nothing left of the man and boy when the remaining spiders reached the boat.

For every spider Ben swatted with the oar, there were several more spilling into the boat. His arms shaking and his body trembling from the venom racing through his blood, Ben was barely able to stay on his feet. Driven by survival instinct, he swung the oar at anything that moved. The boat interior was filled with the sickening crunch of the oar against their bodies, like crab shells cracking. The force of the blows sent spiders rocketing against the fiberglass sides, some breaking open on impact, guts and milkweed-like secretions oozing out of their skin. Others landed on the backs, legs flailing madly as they suffered their death throes.

But there were so many of them.

Dizzy and nauseous from the spider’s attack, Matt stumbled weaponless across the boat as more spiders sprung toward him. One landed on his left arm, and before he could knock it off, a monstrous, ink-black spider attached itself to his right arm, digging fangs which felt like switchblades into his flesh. The abomination had wrapped its legs around the center of his arm, bear hugging him so that Matt could not bend his elbow. Now the spider was skittering itself upward, not releasing its python grip, inching toward Matt’s neck.

Ben felt the boat shake as something crashed to the floor. He half-expected to see a spider the size of a wolf, but what he saw when he turned was even more terrifying. Matt was face down on the floor, gurgling in the shallow water, as a mass of spiders swarmed over his body. The boy’s legs were twitching, spasming. He thought he heard his son whispering for him.

Head spinning, Ben somehow maintained balance as he swung the oar against the spiders crawling across Matt’s body. The spiders scattered across the boat with each swipe, only to turn and immediately resume the attack. Ben thought to lay himself atop Matt as a human shield; but he knew that if he did so, they would both be overwhelmed. Ben saw a nightmare image of Matt and him cocooned on the boat floor, eyes lifeless, as spindly legs skittered across their bodies, fangs drawing blood until their bodies were dessicated, skeletal shells.

Ben’s arms seemed to swing the oar on their own. For a moment, he felt disembodied, as though he were watching the desperate battle from afar. The bottom of the boat was covered with broken spider bodies, abdomens split open, pouring forth pus.

He was vaguely aware that the boat had drifted a few feet off shore, advancing and retreating to and fro with the tide. He thought—or rather, he prayed—that the boat was too far offshore for the swarm of spiders on the beach to reach them. He hadn’t heard them hitting the sides of the boat or skittering along the outer hull in the last minute. If he saw more of their legs appearing over the sides, he might go mad.

When a spider darted out of the stern toward his son’s neck, Ben belted the hissing monster with the oar. It ripped through the air, clipping the edge of the outer wall as it flew into the Atlantic.

He felt eyes on his back, as though the cold breath of the undead had touched his skin. A loud hiss spun Ben around so that he was staring at the mammoth spider that had attacked Matt. Its front legs raised into the air, and Ben saw it lean back, ready to spring. Another spider came at Ben from the side, and he swatted it away, never taking his eyes off the black Goliath in front of him. Then he raised the oar, daring the beast to come for him.

The spider leaped at him, its weight rocking the boat. In a moment of frozen time, he saw its razor fangs, dripping with venom, his pallid reflection mirrored as eight distinct ghosts in the spider’s eyes, its front legs hooked over, ready to latch itself onto him. He swung the oar in blind desperation. He made solid contact, but it felt as though the oar had struck a tree trunk. Fear screamed through his body, as he heard the oar snap.

The boat, the ocean, and then the sky wheeled past his eyes in a dizzying view from an amusement park ride. As he was driven backward, his head struck the side of the boat. The spider scrambled atop him, smothering his chest and neck in a swarm of legs. He saw his reflection in the eyes again—the reflection of a dead man. The spider lunged at his neck. He bucked upward, and the fangs missed their mark but tore through the underside of his chin like dual knives plunging into a soft underbelly.

He heard himself scream as the spider reared back. He could feel the venom burning under his skin, spreading into his face and down his neck as if his flesh was afire. His arms spasming, he thought in frigid terror that the venom was paralyzing him. No longer able to fight back, he knew he was going to die.

As though in slow motion, he saw the beast’s front legs raise into the air, spider eyes centering on his. Blood—his blood—dripped off the spider’s fangs like the crimson maw of a ravenous vampire.

The spider sprung at his face—a black, alien nightmare. He closed his eyes.

It crashed down on his upper chest, well short of its intended target. Teetering on the edge of consciousness, he was vaguely aware of the spider twitching, grotesquely spasming atop him. His eyes shut, he saw the world awash in reds and pinks through closed eyelids. The spider seemed to be pressing down on his chest with greater force, though strangely the infernal hissing had ceased, and the razor fangs were not tearing the flesh off of his bones. I must already be dead, he thought.

His eyes squinted open, and just before he drifted into unconsciousness, he saw the glint of the descending sun in the spider’s lifeless eyes, the broken shaft of the oar impaled in its abdomen, Matt standing over the spider, insanity in the boy’s eyes…

***

He awoke to a patchwork quilt of a million stars.

The keening of the ocean breeze rippled the water’s surface, which sparkled like a mirror image of the midnight sky. He tried to lift his head, but it felt as though it was weighted down by sandbags.

“Dad?”

Ben turned his head toward the voice. Matt knelt beside him.

“Where are we?”

“Heading northeast according to the compass.” Matt held the broken oar, pointing at the paddle end. “It still works.”

“You did good, son. Real good.”

The broken oar.

Ben twitched and brushed his hands down his body at invisible attackers.

“Spiders!”

“No,” Matt said, placing his hands on his father’s chest to keep him still. “They’re dead. They’re all dead. Rest a little longer. We’ll find our way home tomorrow.”

Home.

Ben lay his head back against the wet floor of the boat. The craft rocked to a soothing ocean lullaby. The moon, three-quarters full, bathed the endless sea in azure tones from horizon to horizon. He closed his eyes.

***

Ben didn’t recall awakening to the thin strip of predawn gray light that bubbled out of the eastern waters. Matt, knees pulled up to his chest and head resting against the hull, saw his father rise zombie-like, shuffling, stumbling, and careening off the sides of the boat until he reached the colored spaghetti wires. The venom no longer seemed to be advancing, and though Ben’s head felt as though it were being dragged behind the boat through suffocating waves, he had sufficient strength to drag himself to the wheel.

Matt watched with wonder as his father, eyes closed as though he were sleepwalking, played his hands through the myriad strands of wire like a blind, idiot savant. Matt leaned his head back against the boat and closed his eyes. He was not the least bit surprised by the sound of the motor roaring to life. He laughed, thinking at that moment that his father was the same superhero he had considered him to be as a child, capable of anything. When Matt’s eyes squinted open, he saw his father—eyes still shut yet drifting between the wheel, the compass, and the water as though he were receiving signals from radio waves—queerly navigating the boat to the northeast.

Matt let the broken oar fall out of his hands. He knew he would not be needing it anymore. As reassuring comfort spread through him like the radiant heat of a wood stove in winter, he drifted into sleep.

***

When Ben awakened to distant shouting, the sun was at its midmorning position over the ocean, the warm, orange coloration already giving way to a fiery white. He glanced over at Matt, the boy’s head resting on his shoulders. The waves were louder and hollow sounding, as if his ear was pressed to a seashell. The shouting grew closer, louder. Ben wasn’t sure what the voices were yelling, but he was pretty sure they were speaking Spanish.

He had just enough strength to cock his head over the side of the boat.

Land. Beautiful land.

A motorboat full of three dark-skinned men raced toward them, their boat bouncing over waves like a wheelie-popping motorcycle. He drifted unconscious momentarily and then was reawakened by a sun parched face breathing over him.

“Where are we?” Ben asked in a hoarse whisper.

“Que?”

“St. Croix,” said an unseen man who apparently understood English.

“My wife. St. Kitts,” Ben muttered.

“No problem. We get you home. First to shore and hospital.”

The English speaking man climbed into the boat and stayed with Ben and Matt while the other motorboat dragged their craft to shore. Ben could hear him talking to Matt about something—baseball, he thought, and if the Yankees were going to make the playoffs—but it was all mired in the fog of semi-sleep. He could feel sea spray on his face and their boat riding continuously up and over waves, like the never ending humps of a wooden roller coaster track.

Then he was being helped to his feet, off the boat and onto a beach, the sunlight like a nuclear blast against his sensitive eyes.

There was a siren wailing in the distance—a little different sounding than the ambulances back home, Ben thought. He could hear concerned murmurs as people massed around them, many of the voices from fellow vacationing Americans.

Ben glanced back at the motorboat one last time as his feet sank into wet sand. Stumbling forward onto hard shells, he shivered. He could see the web glistening beneath the wheel, extending along the bow. It sparkled in the strengthening sun, rippling with the sea breeze like a bed sheet hung to dry by clothespins. He thought he could see something darker hanging back behind the web, hunkered down like a lion on the Savannah, biding its time. Ben pointed toward the web as his legs buckled beneath him. Then he was clutched by another set of arms and whisked toward the ambulance at the edge of the beach.

***

Ben and Matt received intravenous fluids throughout the afternoon at a tiny hospital where no one but a few doctors spoke English.

Relieved, Marie arrived shortly after supper, firing admonitions that if they were ever to take a boat into unfamiliar waters again, they would have to answer to her. The doctor overseeing Ben and Matt— a grandfatherly man who spoke Spanish, Creole, and English—gave the clearance for them to be released with Marie that evening.

The doctor listened to their stories of the attacking spiders, examining the myriad puncture wounds covering their bodies. Perhaps the two Americans had stumbled into a den of tarantulas. Certainly their memories were exaggerated by the stress of being lost at sea and weathering the tropical heat without adequate protection. A nurse—a native islander who spoke no English—rubbed a salve over their punctured flesh, her eyes barely containing her building terror as she subconsciously estimated what size of spider could have produced the abnormally large wound spacings.

At 8:30 pm, as the mystical blue of twilight dripped like a soothing balm over the islands, the disabled motorboat—tied to a pier near the edge of the tourist beach—bobbed and danced to the tempo of the black and silver sea. Two young brothers played in the sand, the slightly older boy laying a bucket face down on the edge of a crude sandcastle kingdom. Removing the bucket, he smiled contentedly at the wet, molded turret which completed the masterpiece.

As the boys’ mother yelled at them for the last time to pack their gear in her beach bag, the younger brother crafted tiny holes for windows with his fingers, wondering what the fuss was about. The mother watched the shadows of the pier stretch like gnarled fingers across the sand toward her children, eyes fixed warily on the boat which slid on the tide between sand and water. Something unsettled her about the boat, which appeared skeletal and black in the dying light.

Now the shadows raced across water and sand, like ink pouring out of the heavens. She realized with sudden panic that she could no longer see her children, who were swallowed whole by the encroaching darkness. She called again, and as the frantic edge in her voice cut through the gloom like a machete, something spilled over the side of the boat onto the wet sand. A black mass of writhing legs reached into the night air; and then it flipped itself over to its stomach and crept toward the kingdom of sand. The bloated spider was huge, very hungry, and very pregnant. It lunged toward the shapes which surrounded the castle, fangs dripping with venom, just as the woman’s hands reached forward to drag her protesting children away from the water.

As she hurried the children off the beach toward the ocher lights of their resort, she heard a hissing sound, like the sand had opened up to a pit of snakes. Then something skittered across the beach behind them, moving toward the deeper shadows of lush flora between the beach and the resort. The woman dragged the boys along faster, not stopping when the younger brother lost his flip-flops or when the older brother stumbled over the smooth planks of the palm-lined boardwalk.

She ran with held breath, convinced that the devil himself had emerged from the ocean waters, not stopping to breathe until she and the boys were inside the resort, doors closed to the night. And then, as her children bleated over stubbed toes and lost shoes, she looked into the mass of ferns and palm fronds. There was something creeping through the shadows. She rushed the boys toward the elevator doors, desperate to put more walls between her and the night.

One Autumn in Kane Grove

The autumn of Kane Grove was born teetering on the edge of extinction.

As the wind whistled a frigid requiem against the outer walls of the university library’s computer wing, I saw myself quoted on the internet, this time on one of those big news websites like the ones that cover presidential primaries, the Dow Jones, and Middle-Eastern wars. The quote was nebulous, and honestly I don't remember much about it, except that a mousy female reporter had stuck her smart phone in my face as I was hurrying across the quad, trying to get to my calculus class before 3 p.m.

Before this autumn I don't think anyone outside of New York even knew Kane Grove College existed; now you can turn on CNN and see the campus, the Jamison Sciences tower pointing into the milky sky like a fleshless finger, as harried students hustle by in the foreground.

Dad blames the university.

“This sort of thing doesn't happen at Hamilton or Bowdoin,” he told me on the phone last week. “Take next semester off, and get your applications filled out. Someone as smart as you shouldn't be wasting time at a school like Kane.”

Mom just sits and cries, worried sick that I'm going to be next.

On September 21st, autumn rolled into upstate New York like a January tidal wave off Nova Scotia, and campus police found the first body. As I ran up University Avenue, the sharp edges of textbooks inside my knapsack stabbing into my back, I cursed under my breath for not wearing anything heavier than a sweatshirt.

Chill and wicked, the wind whipped across the Finger Lakes like a petulant child that refused to wait for Christmas. Sunset was but an hour away, and though the hour was late and the sky a boiling mass of slate gray, I remember how much the failing light bothered my eyes, a surefire sign of a monster migraine encroaching.

A girl with her head lowered into her chest passed in the other direction, a pretty little ghost train racing to stay ahead of winter. Apparently she hadn't read or believed the weather report either because she wore cutoff jean shorts and a tank top that slouched off one shoulder. Her flip-flops slapped against the concrete to a frantic tempo that echoed staccato-like off the brick facades of bordering dormitories. It wasn't until I guiltily stole a glance at her from behind that I realized the girl was Kari Morton.

Halfway up the hill to my dormitory, Lee Hall, I scarfed down a slice of white pizza from the Bethany Union cafeteria. I hadn't eaten since breakfast, which was probably the reason I started getting a headache, and hell if I didn't want to take refuge from the biting cold for a few minutes. Big mistake. Fifteen minutes later I was hunched over and heaving something that looked like pizza into a toilet as I thought about whose ass I was going to kick for giving me food poisoning. I don't remember how I ended up in my dorm room or falling asleep on my bed.

Around 10 p.m. my roommate, Mitch Hollingsworth, wearing a Make Art Not War t-shirt, excitedly whipped our door open, denting the plaster with an outline of the knob. To my delicate ears it sounded like a shotgun blast.

“What do you think about Kari Morton?”

“What?” The room was spinning as if I had just stepped off one of those playground merry-go-rounds that used to make me nauseous.

“Holy crap, Dan. What the hell is wrong with you?” I don’t think Mitch was concerned about my health so much as he didn’t want to catch whatever it was I had. He took a step backward.

“Food poisoning. Bad pizza. I’d stay away from Bethany if I were you.”

“That sucks, but you gotta hear this,” he raced on, evidently no longer concerned about whether I might roll over and die. “Campus security found Kari Morton dead near the quad.”

“Dead?”

“Murdered.”

“Murdered?”

“Is there an echo in here?”

I felt like someone punched me in the teeth.

“The cops are everywhere. But that isn’t the craziest part,” Mitch said, and by the way he emphasized the last part I sensed it had been killing him to get to the gory details. “The guy who did it must have been a total wacko. He stabbed her in the neck.”

As I thought about Kari racing past me on University Avenue, so close I could have touched her bare shoulders or breathed the mango-scented shampoo in her bouncing, brunette curls, a chill ran through my bones, like a phantom passed right through me.

“What time did this happen?”

“After dark. Probably 7:30 or 8 o’clock.”

When had I passed her? Ninety minutes prior to her murder, if that.

“How do you know all of this?”

“You know Sam from chem lab? Well, he knows this dude from Randall Hall that was at the front of the police barricade when they were zipping her up.”

“Zipping her up?”

“Body bag, duh.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I feel like shit. I might skip psych tomorrow morning.”

“Yeah, man. Sleep in. You look like spoiled yogurt. Smell like it, too.”

“Up yours. Do the police know who killed her?”

“No. But Sam knows this other dude who says Kari broke up with some townie she was dating.”

“Kari dated a townie?”

“I know, right? Big guy. Football player or something. Sam says he was nuts. Freaking nuts. But what do you expect from a gap-toothed, tobacco-spittin’ townie?”

“Oh sure, everyone’s hometown is backwards except for the one you came from,” said a female voice from around the corner. Appearing in the doorway, Gina Artuso wore a concerned look on her face.

Self-consciously pulling the blanket toward my face, I felt the heat in my cheeks. God, I didn’t want her to see me like this. Gina stood by my bedside now, curly blonde locks draped over her shoulder. “Is it the pandemic?”

“Yeah. You’ll be dead by morning.”

“Then I guess you aren’t taking me out for pizza Friday night?”

Just hearing the word pizza sent my stomach roiling again.

“Just something I ate. I’ll be fine tomorrow.”

**

The next morning I skipped psychology and slept straight through chemistry, too. Stumbling out of bed at noon, I felt as though I had the worst hangover of my life.

Having missed my only classes of the day, I ventured out at one o’clock on legs that shook as much from disquiet as they did from food poisoning. The quad bustled with conversation. I looked at everyone a little differently, and they did the same to me.

The sun was out again, and the way that it glared off the white concrete made my head feel as if it was trapped inside a vise. Nevertheless, I fought the urge to wear sunglasses, wanting to appear as inconspicuous as possible, the way you might keep your hands out of your pockets in an unfamiliar convenience store so nobody gets the mistaken impression you are shoplifting or hiding a handgun.

Except for a few lone individuals hurrying between classes, most everyone on the quad was broken into groups which quickly formed, broke up, and reformed like transient football huddles. The rumble of conversation drifted out of the concentric gatherings, bits and pieces catching on the wind.

“...knew a guy who knew someone who dated her last year.”

“...gouged out her throat.”

“She was such a pretty girl. Why would someone…”

“Some asshole townie…”

Amid the disorganized groups crawled a small army of police and campus security, each faction vying for dominance over the investigation. For the next three days the cops buzzed about like worker bees, and then the university returned to normalcy, Kari’s murder a baleful whisper on the wind.

A sea of charcoal-gray clouds rolled overhead during the first week of October in concert with a Lake Ontario wind that cut through double-layered sweatshirts and sweatpants and demanded we grudgingly don winter jackets. The coldest autumn air mass the northeast had seen in twenty years poured into Kane Grove.

My afternoon migraines came and went like the tide, but they became frequent enough that Mitch threw me into his car one afternoon and drove me to a nearby walk-in clinic. A graying doctor with a combination pencil-thin mustache and disheveled hairdo which made him look like a cross between Clark Gable and Albert Einstein poked and prodded me for thirty minutes. He gave me the usual rest and relaxation advice doctors give to people with head colds and advanced stages of cancer. Three days later I received a voicemail from his office stating my white count was low and I needed to eat more fruits and vegetables.

The campus buzz over Kari Morton dissipated to the occasional nervous whisper before the Kane Grove police department found the second body—a twenty-something woman in her third year of teaching at Medwick Elementary School three blocks north of campus. Her name was Maryann Neville. Reading the story in the GROVE PRESS, I shivered. I knew well the area around Medwick and often biked there when the weather was more reasonable.

I felt an overwhelming sense of deja vu as I studied her smiling face on the front page. Pulled back into a ponytail, her blonde hair had a vibrant glow that the black-and-white medium couldn’t suppress. Far be it from me to forget a pretty face. Surely in a town as small as Kane Grove we had happened upon one another in a grocery store checkout line or downtown bar. Perhaps I had brushed up against her in Starbucks, our eyes meeting as her lips curled into a smile.

Miss Neville had stayed past dark to fight her way through a backlog of homework assignments. As desiccated leaves rained in variegated oranges around Miss Neville on the evening of October 4th, she rushed toward her vehicle in the deserted school parking lot. Her shoes scuffled against the concrete, and leaves crunched underfoot like the cackle of witches as the long, black fingers of lamppost shadows reached across the parking lot. She had nearly reached her blue Prius, a lifeless slate in the moonlight, when—

Her body was found at midnight by Harley Bouchard, an overnight janitor who had stepped outside for a smoke and a look at the stars. He found Neville lifelessly staring into a depthless sky, a considerable chunk missing from her neck.

There came considerable debate over the nature of her wound. The police referred to it as a deep gouge, possibly from a knife or some other sharp implement, while the coroner controversially suggested the wound was more consistent with an animal attack. But the macabre debate between the police and coroner was drowned out by the holy war being waged between the town of Kane Grove and its university.

Hysterical and dripping with vigilantism, commentary in the town’s GROVE PRESS purported the Neville murder was retaliation by university students for the murder of Kari Morton. Some called for the university to be closed indefinitely until the murderer was rooted out. The argument seemed shallow since there were no suspects in the Morton murder, despite water cooler talk of the psychotic townie boyfriend.

There is a thicket on campus that stretches from the hill dormitories at the top of University Avenue down past the backside of the buildings along the northern border of the quad. Buckled into humps by subterranean tree roots and brutally long winters, a blacktop walkway side winds through the thicket down to Branson Creek Road. The thicket path is a preferred route for most students, as it provides a shortcut to both the quad and to two convenience stores just north of campus.

By the end of the first week of October, the path through the thicket developed a sense of foreboding, as though a great weight pushed down on it. I had just come from the store on a Monday evening, and as I climbed the path the wind groaned through the tree tops in a spectral dirge. I huddled against the bitter wind that seemed determined to force its way inside of me.

Skeletal trees rose black all around me, with still a few dried leaf carcasses left to drift earthward. I jumped each time I heard tree limbs rubbing against each other, sounding as though saws were cutting through bone. I quickened my pace, expecting something to jump out at me from the trees. Heart racing, I emerged to ashen parking lot lamplight behind the Jamison Sciences tower. I hurried forward without looking back, feeling as if I had escaped a haunted house

When I entered the student center in the heart of the quad, a black, boiling cauldron of hysteria overtook the students. I learned from one breathless girl that Kari Morton’s body had been stolen from Pineview Cemetery in her hometown outside of Syracuse. Some students supported the notion that townies were responsible.

The idea that a vigilante group of Kane Grove citizens had driven forty miles to desecrate a teenage girl’s gravesite was preposterous; but it didn’t quell the coming week’s vandalism and fistfights spreading through Kane Grove like air rippling outward from a bomb blast.

**

Though my headaches lessened into mid-October, my sleep became more fitful. When I dreamed, I often found myself within the thicket, the gnarled limbs of barren trees reaching toward me, the bitter wind the screams of Kari Morton and Maryann Neville.

After the third body, a sensual, redheaded university junior named Laila Jennings, was discovered by a campus security patrolman a week before Halloween, Kane Grove College entered into panic. While some of us had known the Morton girl, and none had much idea who the teacher from town was, everyone had known Laila.

She was known as Three Degrees of Laila, for if you didn’t know someone who knew someone who had had intimate relations with her, you apparently didn’t get out very much. I sat behind her in modern poetry class last spring, my eyes following along the curves of her smooth legs and searching down low-cut shirts whenever she bent to retrieve her bookbag.

The campus cop who found her had been walking along the shadowed walkway between the five-story library and the student center, his flashlight beam cutting across the pallid concrete in erratic, nervous sweeps. The beam happened upon a heel on the edge of the sidewalk, and then as he gasped, the light found Laila, legs akimbo, body splayed in the grass at the base of the student center ten yards from the shoe. A large chunk of flesh was missing from the right side of the neck.

The next morning we were double-barrel blasted by two rumors which swept through the university. This time the police agreed with the coroner—the gaping hole in the side of Laila’s neck was more consistent with an animal attack than that made by a weapon. No sooner did this piece of news begin to make its rounds than we learned the body of Maryann Neville had vanished from a cemetery near Albany.

It didn’t take long for the more imaginative and delirious among us to suggest the attacks were not those of man or animal but rather of supernatural origin. Perhaps the bodies were not disappearing from grave sites but were leaving on their own.

The word vampire was probably first whispered over lattes and bagels at the student center. Promulgating like a disease, the concept spread through email and over too many drinks at the bars until it became accepted fact that Nosferatu walked among us.

Feeding off the hysteria, every media faction—from local reporters to occult bloggers and national news outlets—swooped down upon us like hungry grackles two days prior to Halloween. That was the same day the female reporter wrestled an incongruous quote from me as I rushed to class. I am certain, quite certain, I had scoffed at the idea of the killer being a vampire. Yet somehow a modernized and bizarre version of the telephone game ensued, and my quote morphed through several iterations, until a national news website had me purporting that Bela Lugosi was running amok.

It was not my parents’ proudest moment.

By now Mom and Dad started leaving me daily voicemails of their intentions to drive to Kane Grove and bring me home. But I couldn’t leave. As frightened as I was, the frenzy attracted me, the way rubberneckers slow down on the highway to watch the bodies being removed from a wreck. Besides, things were starting to progress between Gina and me, and I wasn’t about to leave her alone on campus with a psycho killer.

My roommate, Mitch, got roughed up one night outside of the One For The Road Tavern—a favorite among townies—when three unknown men yanked him out of the passenger seat of an idling vehicle. Mostly they just shoved Mitch among the three of them, like an old pinball machine where the obstacles light up and hurl the ball at a random diagonal, telling Mitch to spread the word that university pricks weren’t welcome downtown anymore.

Gina and I picked up Mitch, and as we drove back toward campus, a blur of streetlights and mostly darkened residences whirring past to either side of Harper Hill, he began to smirk over the assumption that a vampire was loose in Kane Grove.

“But if it really is a vampire,” he said, “it won’t be hard to figure out who he is.”

“How do you mean?” Gina asked, eyeing him in the rearview mirror as she drove.

“Well, he can’t come out in daylight. Who do we know who sleeps all day? I’m thinking it must be one of the townie night shift janitors.”

“You watch too many movies.”

“And you blame everything on townies,” I said.

Gina said, “Just because Dracula had to sleep in a coffin all day doesn’t mean a real vampire needs to avoid the sun.”

“She’s right,” I said. “You can never trust Hollywood. For all we know, he drinks holy water and listens to Gregorian chants while he builds up his vampire skills at the gym.”

Mitch laughed, and then he leaned forward from the back seat and said, “Well, I for one suggest we all keep a stake handy and line our windowpanes with garlic.”

**

My headaches continued to ebb and flow through October. Finally, whatever illness that had ailed me since the first day of autumn fled my body on the day before Halloween, when I vomited on the steps outside of the interfaith chapel. Gina was with me, and as the crowd backed away from us as though I could kill by touch, Gina wrestled me toward her car, demanding I return to the walk-in clinic. But no sooner had we reached the vehicle than the color returned to my cheeks.

“Don’t even start with that it must have been something I ate bullcrap,” she said.

“I’m okay now. Actually I feel pretty damn great,” I said.

And I did. Suddenly I felt as though I had had the best night of sleep of my life. I possessed an incredible sense of clarity, and I felt the muscles in my arms standing out like cords beneath my shirt. I’m not exaggerating when I say that calculus derivations swam through my mind, vibrant images from a photographic memory. I didn’t have any explanation as to why I had so much energy, but if Gina had dropped me off at the gym, I think I could have lifted twice my weight over my head.

Studying my face, perplexed, she said, “You do look better, I suppose.”

“You don’t look like such a slouch, yourself,” I said, and she punched me in the arm.

But as she drove us back toward Lee Hall above University Avenue between curbside mountains of raked leaves which caught the sun in varied shades of ocher, I warily eyed the dashboard clock.

11:58 a.m.

Less than six hours until sunset.

I walked Gina to her room on the girls’ floor, two levels below ours, and she kissed me long on the lips at her door.

That afternoon, despite feeling healthier than I had since summer, I fell asleep watching football in my dorm room. Devoid of dreams, my slumber was at once the sleep of the dead and strangely revitalizing. With Mitch away for the weekend, I might have slept clear through the night had I not awakened to shouts ringing through the dormitory hallway.

I bolted upright, unsure of where I was. The room was dark except for the television replaying highlights of the games I missed. My bedside alarm clock glowed 10:38 p.m.

When I poked my head into the hallway, the corridor started filling with students. They wore haunted expressions on their faces as I closed the door behind me, and when I started to ask the closest person what had happened, a cold dread pouring down my back, Gina pushed her way through the crowd to reach me.

“What the heck is going on?” I asked her. Gina’s eyes were wide and distant as though she were seeing an alternate reality through the wall behind me.

“They found another body, Dan. This time...it’s horrible.” Her lips began to quiver, and I pulled her against me. Her hands sought the folds in my sweatshirt, chest heaving as she sobbed. “They are going to have to close the school.”

“Nobody’s going to close the school,” I said, caressing her hair. “Do you know how much money the university and town would lose if Kane shut its doors?”

“I don’t care if they shut Kane down forever. It could have been one of us this time. It could have been…”

The girl was Kelly Dillon. I realized with building horror that not only had she lived in Lee Hall three doors down from Gina, but that I once dated her for a short time last year. Too close to home.

I was not surprised to learn Kelly had been found in the thicket behind Jamison. A couple walking through the thicket, holding hands and watching the swaying trees uneasily, were surprised by what they thought were raindrops. But the droplets were too viscid and dark to be rain, and when they looked up through the trees toward the wind-torn sky and the screaming face of a full moon emerging from behind the clouds, they saw Kelly.

She was suspended a hundred feet off the ground, her arms outstretched and tied to two bordering limbs. Grotesquely lolled to the side, her neck oozed a steady leakage of ichor. The couple, thinking they had walked through a mud puddle, suddenly realized what they were standing in, and the girl began to scream uncontrollably.

The left side of Kelly Dillion’s neck was...missing, as though some beast had crashed through the thicket and ripped it away with razors for fangs.

The wind had become a shrill force. The girl saw the shadows move from over her boyfriend’s shoulder. She became inconsolable, trying to warn the boy that someone was in the thicket with them, but she was unable to form words. And all about the couple, as the skeletal silhouettes of trees swayed as though laughing, Kelly continued to drip...drip...drip…

It took half the night for police to retrieve the body from the tree tops. It must have been the oddest of crime scene investigations, and I could not help but muse with a wry humor that only seems attainable in the midst of absolute terror, how they would have solved this murder on one of those reality TV cop shows.

The next day—Halloween Day—the university president, Dr. Branson Horwith, waffled uneasily during a televised press conference, sweat beading and running in rivulets across his beet-red face. Most students didn’t wait for Horwith’s decision to keep the university open or close it down, choosing instead to depart Kane Grove as the sun reached its apex and began its inevitable descent toward the horizon.

Riots spread through Kane Grove that afternoon, though I am not convinced the remaining students or town citizens knew what they were fighting over. Gina wanted to leave but found her tires slashed in the dormitory parking lot. Her parents were coming to get her, but they would not arrive from Maryland until the following morning. Only five people remained in Lee Hall on our floor.

Gina fell asleep on my bed around 5:30. Already the shadows grew long on the walkways leading toward the quad. I watched with trepidation as the bloody orb of the dying sun was dragged toward the horizon, the rays washing the treetops in slashes of amber. I had a commanding view of the valley. Sweeping across the horizon, my eyes centered on an odd procession: a miniature parade of garish costumes, flashlights, and shades of orange. Trick-or-treaters, rushing to embrace the holiday before the unseen dangers of nightfall reached Kane Grove.

I gently shook Gina’s shoulder and said, “I need to eat. I’m starving.”

She muttered something about being careful and getting back before sunset.

“I’ll be back. I promise.”

I brushed her hair away and kissed her on the forehead. Glancing one last time out the window, I saw the sun appear to accelerate toward the earth as though dragged into an open grave.

**

Jesus, it was cold. As I raced against time toward the thicket pathway, I pulled the hood of my sweatshirt over my head and yanked tight on the drawstrings. Save for three tightly-grouped students walking in the distance, the university sidewalks appeared deserted. Incandescent lighting shone through a wide scattering of windows, peering at me like cat’s eyes.

The wind seemed to moan a haunted dirge through the trees, and as the already blackened thicket pathway came into view behind Jamison, I knew the sun would surely set by the time I returned from the convenience store.

The trees seemed taller in the failing light, leering down at me as I strode into the heart of the thicket. Dead leaves crackled underfoot like brittle bones. All I heard was the unsettling song of the wind through the trees and the sound of footfalls. Were the footfalls mine, or were there others behind me? Sounds have a funny way of echoing off the trees in the thicket. I glanced behind uneasily. Shadows reached across the pathway, swimming with movement.

At the center of the thicket, just off the pathway, stood a rickety, wooden maintenance shed. I never liked passing the old shed during the daytime, and as I moved past it with nightfall rapidly invading, my eyes were drawn to it as Hansel’s and Gretel’s surely had been to the witch’s lair.

Movement in the shed’s window caught my eye. A face. Something. It could have been my reflection...it could have…

Overcome by blood rushing into my head, I collapsed to the earth. My head throbbed, pounded, feeling as though it might burst. I vaguely recall wishing the Gable-Einstein doctor had been a bit more thorough before I drifted into unconsciousness.

**

Someone screamed. A woman...I think...yes it had been…

I awoke in the thicket to pitch dark, the maintenance shed no longer in front of me. Echoing through the trees, the scream jolted me back to clarity, but the shrill echo drifted on the periphery of the howling wind, and I wasn’t certain if the scream emanated from the thicket interior or from dream.

All about me wafted the rich smell of decaying leaves and the sweet scent of a wood stove from somewhere in town. I felt a rock stabbing into my back, and as I rolled onto my side, a tree root dug into my ribs.

The leaves glistened a peculiar black, shiny and sticky. Something else was in the leaves at the edge of the gloom…

maybe a rock…

no…

a shoe?

Heart thudding, I pushed myself onto hands and knees, trying to get my bearings. Behind me, I saw the faraway lights of the Jamison Sciences tower.

As the moonlight slanted through the trees, I raised my wristwatch toward my face and squinted my eyes. 11:49. My God...Gina...I had been asleep for…

The rustling of tree limbs in the inky darkness got me scrambling to my feet, and I raced diagonally down a leaf-strewn slope until I reached the pathway again.

I ran for the lamplights of the parking lot, running to rid myself of the thicket, running from a building horror which slammed against my body and chilled me to the bone. I crashed out of the thicket, hearing a woman yelp in surprise as she threw the tower’s back door shut. The tower lights raced past me in indistinct blurs.

When I burst into the quad, my sneakers echoing hollow off the pavement, I saw Lee Hall above University Avenue. Something drove me forward: the boundless energy I had felt the prior morning and an unrelenting terror which I knew I could not outrun.

Passing the glass entranceway to the Freeman Social Sciences building, I heard the crackle of a radio as a figure darted toward me out of the shadows dressed in a suit which marked him as some sort of federal agent. His eyes widened when he saw my face. His reaction was not surprise but utter horror. I saw only his reflection in the glass as I raced past him.

Frantic voices rang out from somewhere behind me as the lights to Lee Hall loomed closer.

Gina...please, no…

After I cut through a maze of smaller dormitories, the yelling faded into the night. Now I only heard the blood thrum inside my ears, my footfalls strangely silent on the pavement as though I were dreaming.

And then Lee Hall was before me, the cold October night pouring off its concrete walls.

I stared at the cutout Halloween decorations in the entranceway, and as my eyes drifted up the dormitory’s exterior, I froze. A scattering of lit windows shone orange into the gloom.

And in four of those windows were faces.

Kari Morton’s hateful eyes from the fourth floor.

My flesh crawled. Maryann Neville glared accusingly from the second floor, just above me.

Her eyes burning bloody red, Laila Jennings peered out from the third floor.

And from the first floor, Kelly Dillon’s mouth gaped open to reveal wicked fangs.

Overcome by fear, I blinked, and then the faces were gone. Left behind was a bottomless sorrow which threatened to pull me through the earth and into its abyss. I sank to my knees, shoulders heaving as I wept in the lonesome moonlight.

“I’m sorry,” I cried. “I never meant to—”

As the Halloween wind shrieked up the hill and tree limbs rustled like skittering spiders, my eyes caught movement.

Raising my head, I saw Gina, within my top floor dormitory room, slumped over and sobbing into her hands. I wanted to call out to her...to let her know she need not worry. As promised, I had returned to her. For nothing could harm me in the October moonlight.

My legs seemed to move on their own accord, carrying me toward the entranceway. Hinges squealed like vermin as I pressed the door open. I crossed the glass without casting reflection or shadow, my steps reverberating through the vacated halls.

I climbed the stairs, footfalls echoing off the barren walls like thunder.

“I’m coming, Gina.”

Dark Vanishings

Read on for an excerpt

From

Dark Vanishings: Episode One

“[Dark Vanishings] will be leaving its serialized footprint all over the subgenre, making Padavona a well-known name in post-apocalyptic horror.” - Horror Novel Reviews

In the gold-and-flaxen late afternoon sun, cumulus clouds threw cottony shadows against the land, and the park unwound in a lord’s ransom of jade and ruby.

Where am I?

Tori awakened to the thick scent of cut grass. Bleary-eyed, she raised herself up onto her elbows and examined her surroundings. Her mountain bike dozed on its side like a sleeping lion. Fifty yards ahead was a blacktop parking lot dotted by three cars. Behind her bicycle, the grass tunneled down between bordering elm rows and sprawling blackberry bushes embellished with white flowers.

She remembered biking to the park after lunch. But had she stopped to rest? She didn’t recall.

She did remember promising her mother to be home by three so she could shower and make it to the hairdresser by five. Ted Harrison was picking her up at seven for dinner before the high school prom, which gave her just enough time after her hair appointment to slip into her dress and—

I am so freaking late. Mom is going to kill me.

Her red, shoulder-length locks, ablaze in the late day sunshine, were littered with bits of grass and leaves. She thought of Rip Van Winkle and a beard which grew for years and years while life passed him by. How could she have slept for four hours in the town park? Hadn’t the park been crowded with picnickers and fishing boats when she had biked in after lunch?

Within the desolation of the park, she felt strangely exposed.

What if Jacob had come for me while I was asleep?

Jacob Mann, the boy from third period study hall who stared at her daily with a twisted grin that never touched his slate-gray eyes. Jacob Mann, who she had seen last summer, standing among bed sheets hung to dry in her backyard, watching her through her bedroom window. Jacob Mann, who was permanently expelled for threatening Mr. Gilder, the school guidance counselor, with a switchblade.

Last December she had volunteered to distribute food at the Red Oak homeless shelter, and he had been there, standing across the street among leafless deciduous trees, winter cloak billowing like a vampire’s cape, his dead stare burning holes in her.

And last month, when the ground had thawed and the community garden had become ready for planting, she had looked up from her trowel, over the rows of leafy greens, to see him watching her from the sidewalk. Crow-black hair matted to his forehead. Those lifeless eyes. That grin: at-once, vacant and baleful.

Feeling eyes upon her, she sprang to her feet. The copse of elms bordering the decline swayed to the lake breeze, and as dappled light danced amid the branches, she thought she saw a pallid face watching her from the trees.

Jacob?

Her heart thundering, she turned her head toward the bike. If Jacob burst from the trees, would she be able to pedal her way to the parking lot before he cut her off?

When she turned back, the face was gone. Shadows ran deep within the copse, as though night was pooled within, waiting for the sun to depart. But there was no deranged stalker watching her, and she began to feel a little embarrassed for letting her imagination get the best of her.

Feeling along the back pocket of her cutoff jean shorts, she pulled out her phone and checked the time.

4:51 p.m.

She still had time to make the hair appointment.

As she ran to her bike, her shadow followed her, stretching as though it was reflected in a fun house mirror. Clutching the phone, she double-clicked her mother’s smiling face. After a burst of dial tones, the phone began to ring. And ring. No answer. Stuffing the phone back into her pocket, she pedaled across the bumpy grass and hopped the bike onto the blacktop, picking up speed.

She whipped past a black Volvo—unoccupied—and accelerated across the lot, catching a glimpse of an empty red Honda Civic. The lot branched out to a winding, tree-lined park access road. She leaned to the left, taking a blind turn without checking first for traffic. Her heart pounded, and she expected to hear a car horn blare before the metal grille crushed her from the side. But the road was empty of traffic, and there was only the leafy-green smell of summer’s approach on the air as she rushed toward the town center.

Below the shoulder-less two-lane, the land dropped away from a rocky cliff to a gurgling brook thirty feet below. The rear tire caught the edge of the pavement, and as the bicycle wobbled, she leaned hard to the left, righting her balance.

Two minutes later she left the access road behind and coasted into Red Oak proper, past the town courthouse and village green. Catching her breath, she pedaled harder.

4:55 p.m.

As Tori veered north onto Main Street, the modest three blocks of the town center came into view. She passed the police station on her right. Set off to her left was Bob and Mary’s 24-hour diner, the gray, aluminum-sided rectangle flying past in an indistinct blur as her legs pumped faster. Beyond the diner, a half-mile west, meandered the sparkling waters of Cayuga Lake.

A landscaped island divided Main Street with parking spaces aligned diagonally against the island and along the sides of the street. Though the spaces were choked with vehicles, Tori never saw their red brake lights flare to life. In fact, there didn’t seem to be a single car moving along the street.

At the center of downtown, on Main Street’s east side, stood Barbara’s Boutique—a red, brick-faced square squashed between a florist and the Red Oak Cafe. Squeezing the brakes, she wiggled the bike between two SUV’s and hopped the curb onto the empty sidewalk.

That was the moment when she started to worry. Where is everyone? Downtown was resplendent with potted flowers and cardinal splashes of low-angle sunshine. On such a warm Saturday in the upstate New York village, the street should have been busy with pre-Memorial Day shoppers and people going out for an early dinner. But there wasn’t anyone to be seen despite the rows and rows of cars up and down Main Street. She half-suspected that everyone was hidden inside the shops, waiting to jump out in unison and yell Surprise! as if part of a “Twilight Zone”-inspired version of “Candid Camera.”

Leaning the bike against a maple tree which spread a blanket of shade across the sidewalk, Tori ran up the steps. Her heart sank at the sight of the empty boutique. The boutique never closed its doors early on prom night, yet the interior was vacant.

Tori grasped the door handle and pulled, expecting to find the boutique locked. She was surprised when the door opened and the chill of air conditioning spilled down her legs.

Black leather swivel chairs were aligned along the mirrored walls. As she stepped past the cash register into the heart of the boutique, she had the impression of walking through a graveyard. Her reflection paced her on both sides of the elongated room, following her like twin phantoms.

“Hello?”

Her voice reverberated hollow against the walls.

“Mrs. Donnelly? It’s Tori Daniels. I have a five o’clock appointment?”

Barbara Donnelly did not answer because Barbara Donnelly was not there. Yet the lights were on, the air conditioner was rattling through the ceiling vents, and the front door was unlocked. Anybody could have walked through the doors and cracked open the cash register.

“She probably just stepped out for a moment. Maybe I should wait for a few minutes,” Tori said to herself. She sat upon one of the swivel chairs at the back of the store, idly spinning back and forth as her doppelgangers watched from the mirrors. The cool air felt nice on her skin.

Pulling her phone out of her pocket, she dialed her mother again. The phone went on ringing.

“I know you’re there, Mom. Pick up. Please.”

Apparently Cheryl Daniels lay hunkered down with the rest of the townsfolk, playing their little game of hide-and-go-seek on Tori. She nervously scrolled through her messages and noticed no one had written her for several hours. Several text messages had arrived during lunch hour, the last a 12:30 p.m. note from Jana Davies, suggesting that Tori and Ted meet up with Jana and her boyfriend after dinner. Since then, nothing. No missed calls. No frantic voice mails from her mother wondering where Tori was.

Is the network down?

The cooling system whispered white noise. Beyond the front door, shadows grew longer along Main Street, spilling off cars and trees like black ink.

She glanced at a set of black double doors at the back of the store. The supply room. It occurred to her that anyone could be waiting behind those doors, watching her through the slit. She felt her skin prickle.

“Mrs. Donnelly? Are you back there?”

The double doors watched her. The cooling system clanged and bucked as though something was stuck in the pipes. Suddenly the elongated store felt like a crypt, the swivel chairs like torture devices in which scissors sliced and curling irons burned. Tori pushed herself up from the chair.

The knobs to the double doors rattled behind her. Surely her imagination was playing tricks on her and she actually heard the pipes expanding and contracting, as the air conditioner pumped polar air against the afternoon heat. Tori walked straight toward the front doors. Between the swivel chairs. Past the combs and brushes set in jars of blue liquid like preserved body parts. She didn’t dare look back. Because if she did, those black doors would creak open, and something unspeakable would stalk out of the darkness, running its claws along the backs of the swivel chairs as its maw opened to reveal rows of blood-soaked fangs.

No matter how fast she walked, the exit door never seemed to draw closer, as though she were walking on a treadmill. The pipes shook harder. Neglected hinges creaked behind her—the sound of the black doors inching open.

Tori ran for the front door, pulling when she should have pushed. The impact rattled the plate glass, resounding as though a kettle drum had been struck. In her panic, she thought she was locked inside the boutique. Her head cleared. She pushed through the front door and ran for the mountain bike.

The warm air felt stifling after the chill of the boutique. She threw her leg over the bike seat and pumped the pedals, racing northward past empty vehicles neatly aligned along Main Street. The streets were devoid of people. Her hair appointment and the prom long forgotten, she pedaled toward her house. As the hour passed six o’clock, Tori did not yet feel her world tearing apart at the seams. But she would. Soon.

Ready for a wild ride? DOWNLOAD DARK VANISHINGS NOW and read what happens next.

Keep Reading!

I would love to correspond directly with you. Each month I answer questions about my stories, give readers the scoop on my latest projects, review great books and movies, and run giveaways. Please join in on the fun by signing up at http://www.danpadavona.com/new-release-mailing-list/. You will only be contacted once or twice a month, and whenever a new book is about to be released. Your address will never be shared, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

If you liked One Autumn in Kane Grove and The Island, you’ll LOVE my full-length novel, Storberry. CLICK HERE to start reading Stoberry right now.

Storberry is an old-school thriller that returns the vampire mythos to its horrific roots. See what others are saying about Storberry:

“A Genuine Gem of the Horror Genre”

“A Classic Horror Novel”

“[Padavona's] descriptions paint vivid portraits in the mind and help with the visual 'Drive-In movie feel'."

"Finally a vampire story where the monsters are actually scary."

"Foreboding and moody. I love it!!!"

"[Padavona's] descriptive imagery is outstanding. I truly 'see' this town and the characters."

Ready to be scared? DOWNLOAD STORBERRY NOW and turn the lights to low.

Author's Note

When I finished writing Storberry, I was genuinely pleased with the final product. However, I felt there was more to the vampire mythos that I wished to touch upon. The human element of vampirism was purposely avoided in Storberry to keep the monsters, well, monstrous.

In One Autumn in Kane Grove, we get to see the human side of the evil running amok through town without skimping on the horror. Kane Grove was a pleasure to write.

The Island was borne of a nightmarish vision of what might lurk in the uncharted corners of our world. Though I admit to finding spiders creepy, I rather like and certainly appreciate the little guys. Where would we be without them? Probably knee deep in mosquitoes.

Thanks are once again in order for my wife Terri, and our children, Joe, and Julia. I also wish to thank the multitude of friends and family who have supported my efforts and become my first readers. You are my motivation, and I hope you continue to follow along on this exciting journey.

I wish to thank my editor, Jack Musci, who once again proved invaluable. Thank you for helping me track down the missing words and gremlins which seem always to elude the eye of the writer.

Although some of the locations surrounding the Lesser Antilles and Kane Grove are actual places, Kane Grove itself, its university, and the lost island are wholly of the author's imagination. Any resemblance between the people in this book and people in the real world is purely coincidental and unintended.

About the Author

Dan Padavona is the author of the Dark Vanishings series, Storberry, Shadow Witch, and the horror anthology, The Island. He lives in upstate New York with his beautiful wife, Terri, and their children, Joe, and Julia. Dan is a meteorologist with NOAA’s National Weather Service. Besides writing, he enjoys visiting amusement parks, beach vacations, Renaissance fairs, gardening, playing with the family dogs, and eating ice cream.

Visit Dan at: www.danpadavona.com