Animosity
Author: James Newman
Date: 2011-04-01 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror Fiction; mass hysteria; Monsters; violent; scary; night of the living dead; trapped; rumors; Thriller; horror story; Mystery; human monsters; dark fiction; gossip; insane; Stephen King; mob men
Description: Animosity is the story of Andrew Holland, a bestselling horror writer whose life begins to mirror the fictional nightmares of his novels after he finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Andy’s wife recently left him for another man. To keep from getting too depressed about that, Andy has thrown himself into his writing more vigorously than ever, when he’s not spending as much time with his daughter, Samantha, as joint custody allows. His neighbors seem proud to know him (although none of them would admit to reading “that kind of stuff”). The author is the closest thing to a celebri
Publisher: Permuted Press

A PERMUTED PRESS book

Published at Smashwords

ISBN (Trade Paperback): 978-1-61868-2-383

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-61868-2-390

Animosity copyright © 2013
by James Newman

All Rights Reserved.

Cover art by Dean Samed, Conzpiracy Digital Arts

This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Table of Contents

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Part Two

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Epilogue

“’Tis slander, Whose edge is sharper than the sword, whose tongue

Out-venoms all the worms of Nile, whose breath

Rides on the posting winds, and doth belie

All corners of the world.”

--William Shakespeare, “Cymbeline”

“Gossip is always a personal confession of malice… it is a low, frivolous, (and) dirty business. There are neighborhoods where it rages like a pest; churches are split in pieces by it, and neighbors made enemies for life…”

--Jack Holland

“The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.”

--G.K. Chesterton

Ten minutes ago I killed three of my neighbors.

***

Perhaps I should feel something—disgust, remorse for what I have done. But for now I am only numb.

Hot blood drips into my eyes. Some of it is mine, but not all of it.

“Drive faster,” I tell the man behind the wheel. I can barely hear my own voice above the shrill ringing in my ears.

I cough, tasting cold steel and bitter bile, and something ricochets off the dashboard into my lap. Several somethings: small, off-white, speckled with dark crimson and trailing meaty pink tails…

Two of my front teeth. And the jagged splinter of a third.

“Faster,” I start to weep. “P-please…”

I peer down at the hole in my chest. It seems to pucker up and grin at me, like a cruel alien mouth dribbling gore.

My tears burn like acid through the grit upon my face.

“For Christ’s sake, don’t stop for anything…”

***

Ten minutes ago I killed three of my neighbors.

Four, if you count the baby.

***

Ben Souther was the first. At one time, I suppose I would have called Ben a friend. We had emptied countless bottles of beer together on his front porch during so many hot summer nights. No matter how depressed I got about my recent divorce, my next-door neighbor always made me smile with his endless repertoire of spontaneous quotations. Of course, that was before I put a bullet in Ben’s throat, watched him fall to the ground, jerking and gurgling like a rusty faucet that has not been used for decades.

Next was a stooped old man by the name of Sal Friedman. Sal had a thick Jersey accent, drove a Cadillac the size of a small yacht. Last I heard from Sal, he was yowling for Sweet Mother Mary to put him out of his misery after I shot him pointblank in the groin. His fancy pink golf pants had gone bright red, and his curly white toupee hung off one side of his skull like a sated parasite as he writhed upon my lawn.

Then there was Donna Dunaway, the lady who lived across the street from me. Despite her “plain Jane” demeanor, I admit I did enjoy a bit of harmless flirting with her even while I was married. I could never understand how her husband Allen had left her last spring (for another man, if you believe the rumors) especially since she was due to have a baby any day now.

I did not want to hurt Donna. Or the child inside of her.

But I had to shoot her twice.

PART ONE

July 17 - July 31

CHAPTER ONE

It seems like months have passed since it all began.

Hard to believe it has barely been three short weeks since my world came crashing down, and my life became a nightmare.

Like something out of one of my books.

CHAPTER TWO

My name is Andrew Kenneth Holland. I am thirty-nine years old.

And I am a horror writer.

Shit… that sounds like some sort of confession, doesn’t it? A shame-faced introduction to Hacks Anonymous:

ME

(hanging head, sniffling softly)

Hello. I’m Andy. I write horror for a living.

FELLOW LOSERS

Hi, Andy!

Once upon a time, I did not apologize for my profession. After all, writing about demons, zombies, vampires, and serial killers has done quite well for me through the years. These days, however, I find myself wishing more and more that I had followed in my father’s footsteps.

Surely life would have been much safer in the HazMat business.

***

I was twenty-one years old when I sold my first novel, Wolf Moon. The critics loathed it—Monthly Fiction Digest called it “a plotless plethora of ribald sex and gore redeemed only by the death of its despicable anti-hero”—but when all was said and done that hardly mattered. Nine months after the release of the paperback edition, a top production company in Hollywood bought the movie rights to Wolf Moon for a price somewhere in the mid- six figures. The nasty comments made about my work by a few self-important “reviewers” rolled off my back like so much bloody water (if you will), and here I am. I have been writing for a living ever since.

To date I’ve published thirteen novels under my own name. Blood Dance, Brain Fever, The Night People, House On Harding Street, and Slow Burn (my latest) are a few titles you might recognize. Most of my books have seen print in at least a dozen different languages all over the world. Wolf Moon VI: The Return was released just last month direct-to-video, and though I cringe when I think of what the producers did the first five times to my tale of werewolves in the Big Apple, I really cannot complain considering I was once again paid handsomely for my ideas. I have also written four young-adult horror novels—Cannibal High, Devil’s Detention, A Date With Dracula, and Go See Principal Zombie—under the pseudonym “Anthony Dutch.” Per our contract, I owe my publisher one more of those (the last in my popular “Frightsville, U.S.A.” series) before the end of this year.

Unfortunately, I do not know when that will happen. If it will ever happen…

So much has changed, you see.

Everything has fallen apart.

***

I used to consider myself fortunate. There are only a handful of writers who make a decent living working in this genre, much less a very good living. I often have a hard time believing I am one of them, a member of this elite club.

Horror has long been considered, depending on whom you ask, the “ghetto” of the literary world. It is a genre just a step above smut in many critics’ eyes. I know—I have experienced such pretension firsthand. I’ve witnessed the way readers of “real fiction” peer down their noses at me when they wander by mistake into one of my bookstore signings. I have seen the condescending smiles on the faces of the reporters from the Harris City Tribune who beg me for an interview every Halloween (that is the time of year, after all, when it is okay to dwell upon evil and darkness and ghastly, grinning things from the grave). To this day, I still field countless questions from my friends and family regarding when I plan to write a “serious” novel. Something that will stand the test of time long after I’m dead and gone.

I usually just grin every time I hear that old standby. I humor those who ask it, and I lie, “Wait. I’m working on several as we speak.”

As for my neighbors… once upon a time, the folks in my community seemed proud to know me. As if, by acquainting themselves with someone “famous,” they felt elevated above their humdrum suburban roles. Don’t get me wrong—by no means do I think I am better than anyone else, nor do I consider myself a celebrity. I am far from a household name. But to the ladies and gentlemen of Poinsettia Lane, I might as well have been a movie star. Even the ones who claimed they never read “that horror stuff”—which was at least ninety-nine percent of them—offered me more-than-friendly waves and hearty hellos every time I passed in my Explorer. Sal Friedman up the block called me “Mr. Writer Fella” from the first day we met. His trademark greeting was “How’s the horror business?” and the old guy always seemed so sincere in wanting to know despite the fact that he perpetually mispronounced my genre “hair-o.” Joe and Eileen Tuttle, the black couple who lived in the Dutch Colonial four houses down from mine, used to plead with me on a monthly basis to come speak before their respective eighth- and ninth-grade English classes (as “Anthony Dutch,” of course, my young-adult nom de plume). While she claimed Harlequin Romances were more her speed, Mitzi Pastorek came knocking at my door days after the release of every new hardcover I published, requesting I personalize a copy for her niece Brianna, who lived in San Francisco and was “always on the lookout for books and movies relating to the paranormal, since she became one of those ‘gothic people.’ ” Ronnie “Round Man” Miller, owner of the 7th Avenue Stop-N-Shop across town, habitually overstocked my novels on the racks beside his cash register. Any time I dropped by his store for a cup of coffee or a tank of gas he made sure I signed every last copy before he’d let me leave. Being the nice guy I am, I pretended not to notice the 200% mark-up on their cover prices the next time I paid Round Man a visit.

Of course, I could always expect the inevitable inquiries any writer who has been in this business for more than a few years has heard in endless supply. Questions like “Where do you come up with this stuff?” and “Do you know Stephen King?” and “I always wanted to write a book, man… maybe I could tell you one of my ideas and we could split all the profits?” I suspect horror authors hear the latter twice as often as writers of mainstream fiction, as if he who posits such a query has narrowly escaped being lumped in with the sort of sickos who forge successful careers dealing in the macabre.

Sickos like me.

Alas, it is that exact mentality which now makes me realize I should have seen it all coming a long time ago, before things turned bad around here. On more than one occasion after we moved into the house on Poinsettia Lane, I remember my wife mentioned the subtle derision lurking in our neighbors’ eyes beneath their beaming white smiles and eager salutations. The way they stared at me sometimes, Karen said… it was as if they could not decide whether they wanted to ask me for my autograph, or condemn me for concocting tales of madmen and monsters in an already mad, monstrous world.

I told her she was being silly, warned her that we’d better not start making enemies before we had a chance to make friends.

Still… she had a point. A damn good point. I see that now.

They liked knowing me. It made them feel special.

But that never stopped the world around me from thinking I was a little bit weird.

***

We bought the place five years ago this past winter. Karen fell in love with it right away, said it reminded her of her grandparents’ summer home in Tampa. There was nothing fancy about it in the least—to be honest, we could have afforded something much larger and considerably less modest, had we so desired—but we have never been the types to flaunt our good fortune. The house at 217 Poinsettia Lane was enough for our little family, and nothing else mattered. Three bedrooms, one bath. Ranch-style, white with navy blue trim. Seven-foot privacy fence surrounding the backyard. A newly blacktopped driveway. Just under an acre of prime real estate.

And it sat in the middle of one fantastic neighborhood.

Several months after we moved in, Karen quit working full-time. While she kept her name on the substitute teacher lists at the local elementary schools, the cash purchase of our new home proved once and for all that we had done well for ourselves. We were happy. Content. At times, I felt we were the epitome of the American Dream.

That is, until the divorce.

A little less than a year ago, not long after our lucky thirteenth wedding anniversary, Karen began to act… strange. It seemed to happen overnight. Every time I hung up the phone following a long conversation with my agent or a publisher, she would insinuate that there was more going on than just business. She started accusing me almost every day of spending more time in my office, on the phone or on the computer, than I spent with my family. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought she was jealous of my job! And it didn’t help defuse our frequent arguments when I reminded her that this was my livelihood, as it had been since we first started dating. I should have opened my eyes. Should have recognized the warning signs. I was a fool not to realize that, more often than not, it is the guilty who accuse the loudest of all.

One afternoon last spring—on April Fool’s Day, no less, as if any date could have been more sickeningly appropriate—I flew home early from a writer’s conference in Rhode Island to find my wife in our bed with another man.

His name was Jason Burke. He was her boss, the superintendent of the local school system.

He still had his tie on, I remember, as he stuck his cock in places where Karen had never allowed me to go.

Two weeks later, we made it official. I kept the house, the dog, and my Explorer. Karen contested none of it. She wasted no time moving in with the inimitable stud named Jason Burke, taking with her not much more than the clothes on her back, her Volvo, and her cell-phone.

I’m sure I sound bitter. Can you really blame me? But I wished them well. I moved on with my life the best I can, because I had to focus on the most important thing in the world. I had my little girl to think about.

The court gave us joint custody. While Samantha lived with her mother, I got to keep her on Wednesdays and every other weekend.

I know it was tough on our daughter, and I wish Karen and I could have worked it all out somehow.

But then… I wasn’t the one with my boss’s dick in my ass, now was I?

Sometimes it’s easier said than done, trying not to hold a grudge. One thing I swore I’d never do, though, is treat Samantha like a pawn in some twisted game between her mom and me.

“Your mother and I may not be together anymore,” I tell my daughter each time she comes to visit, as she gazes up at me with those angelic blue eyes which look so much older and wiser than those of any eleven-year-old I have ever known, “but I promise Daddy will always love you.”

She smiles, nods. For the most part, she seems to understand.

For the most part.

CHAPTER THREE

It began with the death of a child. A child named Rebecca Faye Lanning.

I found her body one sunny Thursday morning, less than two hundred yards from my front door.

***

You would think Karen and I would have nothing to fight about after the disintegration of our marriage. She got what she wanted, after all. No more sneaking around to hide her infidelity. She had started a new life with a man she decided could satisfy her more than I could, and I did not attempt to stop her. It had even been my idea to let Samantha live with her (perhaps the most difficult decision I have ever made, though in the end I concurred that a young lady on the verge of adolescence needs to be with her mother). But I often wondered if my ex-wife tried to start arguments with me just so I’d lose my temper and say something I would later regret. Then maybe she wouldn’t feel so guilty about flushing thirteen years of marriage down the toilet.

The day it all started, I had called to ask Karen if it would be possible to deviate from our usual schedule. I needed her to keep Samantha for the weekend. It was my turn to pick up our daughter the following Friday afternoon; however, the deadline to my latest novel-in-progress loomed dangerously close, and I hoped an extra evening or two alone might grant me enough time to catch up on a few chapters. I certainly did not prefer to postpone my time with Sam, yet the thought of having to pay back a publisher’s advance because I’d failed to meet my contractual obligations helped dilute the pain of personal sacrifice just a tad.

The way my ex-wife reacted, you would think I had informed her that I never wanted to see our little girl again. That I wished to sign away my paternal rights altogether.

“Sometimes you can be so selfish, Andrew,” she hissed into the phone. “I swear to God.”

She always called me Andrew when we argued. As if she were scolding an ornery brat instead of her former husband. Any other time I was “Andy,” to Karen as with everyone else.

“Jason and I had plans this weekend,” she said, “but I suppose we’ll have to cancel everything now because of your precious manuscript.”

“I just need to switch weekends with you, Karen,” I said. “That’s all. It’s not like I’m asking you to—”

“He finally got his boat, you know,” she reminded me. As if I hadn’t heard all about Jason Burke’s wonderful new boat every fucking time I had spoken with my ex-wife the last few weeks. I felt like I knew it inside and out, as if I had cruised around the world on it once or twice, though I had never even seen the damn thing.

“We’ve been wanting to try it out on Lake Jocassee,” Karen said. “We haven’t had a chance to do that yet, with the new school year coming up, Jason’s workload and all. I guess we’ll have to hang it up this time, too, won’t we?”

I said, “The book is due in six weeks. I have to knock out four or five chapters this weekend or I am screwed.”

“I don’t know, Andrew. We’ve been looking so forward to this…”

I sighed, tried to keep my frustration in check. Failed miserably.

“I’ll make it up to you, Karen. I promise. After I finish this novel, Sam can stay with me as long she wants. Hell, I’ll take her for a week or two. I’d love that, in fact. Then you two can cruise to China in that frigging boat, for all I care.”

“Being a smart-ass won’t help your case,” she said.

“I don’t understand why you can’t take her with you,” I said.

“Maybe Jason and I would like to spend some quality time alone. Have you thought about that? Do you realize how long it’s been since we got to do that?”

“Probably around the time he was sodomizing you in our bed.” It was out of my mouth before I considered the repercussions. I knew it was a mistake, but I didn’t care. Because it felt so damn good.

“That was low,” Karen said.

“If the shoe fits.”

She made a little “hmmph” sound in the back of her throat, as if she had never met anyone more difficult in her life.

I cleared my throat, deciding it might be wise at that point to engage in a bit of damage control.

“Look,” I said softly. “This isn’t worth fighting over. Sam’s old enough to keep herself occupied. It’ll be okay. She can play with her Barbies while I’m in the office, or keep Norman company outside—”

“No,” Karen said, a stern finality in her tone. “Just forget it. Forget it! If you don’t want to spend time with your daughter, that’s fine with me.”

“Oh, please! Karen, now you know I never said tha—”

“She’s been begging to go for a ride in Jason’s boat anyway. You know he even named it after her, which just tickled her to death? I’m sure she will have a blast with us. She always does.”

And with that she hung up on me.

“Bitch!” I shouted at the dial tone. It mocked me, resembled a crude electronic laugh after a few seconds. I slammed the phone back down on its cradle. Then picked it up and did it a few more times. If there is one thing I’ve always despised, it’s someone hanging up on me. Especially her.

Once my tantrum had concluded, I stomped outside for the only thing that calmed my mind when I was having a bad day. I didn’t even bother grabbing my cell out of the office, something I never left behind. There was only one living creature on Earth that I wanted to talk to right now…

I grabbed Norman’s leash by the door on my way, tried not to imagine wrapping it around my ex-wife’s throat and watching her face turn blue.

Deadlines be damned, I decided. My book had waited this long. Another hour or two couldn’t possibly get me any further behind.

***

Norman was six weeks old when he came into our lives. I bought the Golden Retriever for Samantha for her eighth birthday, but he soon became mine by default when my daughter neglected to feed him and take him for walks. Lectures on responsibility aside, I didn’t mind taking over her duties. I think Norman and I both knew all along that we belonged to one another. That dog stole my heart the moment I first saw him gazing out at me through the big bay window of Patty’s Pet Shop on the corner of Fifth and Main. He wagged his tail so hard I remember thinking it was sure to fall off any second.

I named him after Norman Bates, the title character from Psycho. He was such a beautiful beast. His golden fur resembled waves of living sunshine as he frolicked about our property, his tongue lolling out as if the retriever remained in a state of perpetual astonishment at the wonders of the world around him. He was the most loyal sidekick a man could ever have. Sometimes, especially when we were alone, he would act more like a person than any canine I have ever known. He possessed a distinctive personality, communicated with me in ways that seemed too intelligent for a dog, and it was often hard for me to believe that he hadn’t been a member of our family forever.

He was my best friend in the world. The best I ever had.

On the day Karen hung up on me and I stormed out of the house wondering what good had ever come of our partnership—with the exception of a perfect daughter who resembled me far more than her cheating asshole mother by God—Norman rushed across the lawn to meet me the second I opened the gate to the privacy fence surrounding our backyard. He barked three times fast, paused, then barked twice more, his trademark way of saying “hello.”

“Hi, Norman!” I called out to him, jingling his leash in the air between us.

Norman’s doghouse was a miniature version of the old Bates mansion from Psycho. It had been a gift from my former brother-in-law, a carpenter by trade, the previous Christmas. If you looked for it you could even see the gaunt silhouette of “Mother”—a matriarch with long, floppy ears and a protruding canine snout—lurking in one painted window.

I bent to meet the retriever halfway across the lawn. My best friend panted excitedly, that dumb doggy smile never leaving his big golden face as I scratched behind his ears and allowed him one coarse lick at my chin.

“Ready for a walk, old buddy?”

He made a chuffing noise, barked once as if to assure me that he’d been born ready, now what the hell was I waiting for, and tilted his head to one side so I could attach the leash to his collar.

“Good boy. That’s a good boy… ”

At least my dog still loves me.

When that was done, I slapped him gently on one furry haunch. “Let’s go!”

I stood then, and allowed him to lead me out of the backyard, through the gate and down our driveway to the sidewalk lining Poinsettia Lane. I didn’t even scold him when he stopped to mark his territory on one of my Explorer’s new tires.

It was barely eight o’clock in the morning, but the sun hung fat and bright in a cloudless sky as blue as ocean waters. A cool breeze ran its invisible fingers through my hair. Across the street, a robin chirped at us from the feeder on Donna Dunaway’s patio, as if inviting my dog and me to join it for breakfast. Boyish laughter and a firecracker fusillade of cap-gun warfare filled the morning air as the Morgan triplets—Aaron, A.J., and Freddy Jr.—played Cowboys and Indians on their front lawn. As I walked, I slipped a pair of John Lennon sunglasses out of my breast pocket, put them on. I inhaled deeply, savoring the smells of summer: the strong scent of recently mown grass, the heady lilac aroma of Marianne Souther’s flowerbed next door, a hint of chlorine from the Pearsons’ new pool down the block.

“It’s going to be a beautiful day, Norman,” I told my best friend, forcing my troubles with the former Mrs. Holland out of my mind for now. “I refuse to let her ruin it.”

The retriever made a wet, snuffling noise, as if in haughty agreement—he always did like me more than Karen—and we walked on, the furry exclamation point of his tail bobbing up and down to the rhythm of our stroll.

***

“How’s the hair-o business treating you, Mr. Writer Fella?” Sal Friedman called out, throwing up one bony, liver-spotted arm as I passed his home at 222 Poinsettia. He had just backed out of his driveway in his shiny blue Cadillac (the one with the vanity plate: HOLE-N1), and he appeared to be in a big hurry. Of course, Sal Friedman always appeared to be in a big hurry, despite the fact that he had been retired for the better part of twenty years and did nothing but play golf all the time. On the Cadillac’s radio, Tony Bennett crooned his heart out about how love found him just in time.

“I’m doing okay, Sal,” I replied, returning his wave. “How are you today?”

“Eh, can’t complain.” The old man reached to turn down the radio, and his Rolex winked at me in the sunlight. “Arthritis has been acting up a bit, but what else is new. Another day above ground, and all that. No way I’m gonna waste weather like this sitting inside on my keister—you know what I’m saying?”

“I certainly do,” I said.

“Well, my friend, eighteen holes are waiting.” The little pink ball atop his golf hat jiggled as Sal put the Caddy in gear. He licked his lips, offered me a lascivious, yellow-dentured grin. “Enough about those pretty young waitresses at the country club, though. I’ve got some golfing to do.”

I shook my head, laughed. “Take it easy, Sal.”

“You too. Talk to you later, Mr. Writer Fella.”

“Enjoy your game!”

The old man took off then with an uncharacteristic squeal of tires, like a macho teenager showing off in his Daddy’s brand new sports car.

Norman barked a hearty goodbye after the Cadillac, and we walked on.

As we strolled down the sidewalk, I listened to the retriever’s gentle panting in front of me. It was one of my favorite sounds in the world. From somewhere down the block came the bee-like drone of a weed-eater hard at work. The rhythmic tick-tick-tick of a lawn sprinkler. A mother calling out for Jamie to get inside and clean his room right this minute, young man. Not to mention the distant yip of a small dog (probably the Heatherlys’ prized Shih Tzu, Roosevelt). This last sound caused Norman’s ears to perk up for a second, but then he jabbed his shiny black nose into the air as if barking out a response couldn’t possibly be worth his time.

I loved it here, didn’t think I would ever want to live anywhere else in the world than in this neighborhood. Life was perfect here, or as close to perfect as life could get. I couldn’t remember the last time I had been in such a wonderful, carefree mood. I had even forgotten about my fight with Karen.

Along the way I caught more friendly waves from my neighbors: Todd and Patty Carstensen, Yvonne Morgan, Officer Keith Whitmire, Chad and Kimberly Rickman. Oh, yes… and I mustn’t forget to mention an effeminate fellow by the name of Dr. Tom McFarland. The doc wore a Yale T-shirt, matching shorts. Whitest legs I’ve ever seen. As he jogged past Norman and me on the opposite side of the street, I could hear the faint strains of Vivaldi in his headphones. It reminded me of the elevator muzak always playing in his office downtown. McFarland was my ex-wife’s gynecologist. At least, he had been when Karen and I were together. I suppose only Jason Burke knew where she handled such business these days.

“Andy Holland!” I heard a voice off to my left call out then. “How are you this gorgeous Thursday morning?”

I turned and saw Mona Purfield rolling a large plastic garbage can on wheels down to the end of her driveway. Her Siamese cat, Miss Pretty, followed closely at her heels.

Mona Purfield was an obese senior citizen who dyed her hair the brightest orange I have ever seen. When the sun hit it just right, her head looked like it was on fire. She always wore three or four times more make-up than necessary for a woman her age, dressed in flowery muumuus and neon pink flip-flops wherever she went, and spoke in the most nasally, obnoxious voice you can imagine. But Mona was also one of the friendliest people I ever knew. We all felt so sorry for her when her husband Jerry Lee passed away the Christmas before last. No one had seen it coming—one minute the guy is on top of his house, stringing up lights and strands of those plastic icicles, whistling “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” the next minute he’s sprawled out in his front yard with a broken neck, an unfortunate new centerpiece to his wife’s prized nativity scene.

“Hi, Mona!” I said, scratching Norman behind his ears as the old woman waddled toward us. “I’m doing well. How about yourself?”

“Oh, I’m just wonderful.” Mona’s hands went to her hips, and she made exaggerated kissing noises at my dog. “And hello to you too, Mr. Normy-Norman!”

Norman barked a friendly greeting. His tail transformed into a furious, wheat-colored blur.

Mona grinned so widely I was surprised she didn’t smudge some of that gaudy pink lipstick on her ears. “He’s such a good dog.”

She looked down at her cat. Miss Pretty tried to hide behind the garbage can, but her long black tail gave her away. It swished back and forth like an angry snake ready to strike at us if we dared step upon the Purfield property. “Don’t be shy, Miss Pretty. Say hello, now.”

Miss Pretty peeked out at us, meowed up at her mistress, but dismissed Norman and I with a glance that insinuated we were two of the most revolting creatures she ever had the misfortune of knowing. Norman barked a hello Miss Pretty’s way nonetheless. At least, I think he did. For all I know, he called her a stuck-up twat in animal-speak.

“Writing any new books lately, Andy?” Mona asked me.

“Always,” I said.

“Still that spooky-ooky stuff, I’m sure?”

I shrugged. “You know me. Guilty as charged.”

“I think that’s just wonderful,” she said. “I mean, I’ll be honest. I’m no fan of that Stephen King, blood-and-guts stuff. I’d be afraid it would give me nightmares, you know? But I have always thought creative people were so incredibly fascinating. Myself, I can barely write a letter.”

I chuckled.

“Anywhooo,” the old woman said then, in a singsong tone, “we’ll talk again soon, Andy. I’m off to watch Dr. Phil. I never miss his show!”

“Take care of yourself, Mona,” I said.

Norman barked once, as if he also wished Mona nothing but the best, and Miss Pretty darted for the house.

“Now, Miss Pretty,” I heard the old woman scold the cat as they headed back inside, “You know Norman wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

We continued down the block. I whistled as I walked. Before long I felt droplets of sweat beading upon my brow. I wiped them away with the back of one hand.

“Whew, Norman,” I said. “It’s gonna be a hot one today.”

It wasn’t until we came within a hundred feet or so from the end of the street, where Poinsettia Lane merged into Brookshire Boulevard, the highway leading into town, when my dog began to act… well, not like himself at all.

The retriever stopped in his tracks. His ears perked up. He sniffed the air, and a menacing growl rumbled deep in his throat like the threat of a storm on the horizon.

The hair on my arms and the nape of my neck stood up.

“Norman?” I said. “What’s the matter, boy?”

Up ahead, to our left, sat the construction site of a new home at 229 Poinsettia Lane. There wasn’t much to it yet save for a plot of thick red dirt, a concrete foundation, and the partial frame of what would soon be a fancy split-level similar to Doc McFarland’s place across the street. I’d heard a family with the same last name as a recent President had purchased the property (the Clintons? the Bushes? I was pretty sure it hadn’t been the Reagans), but for the life of me I couldn’t remember which one. A high wooden fence surrounded the site. To the left of the rutted driveway, which served as the construction crew’s entrance, a large sign with fancy lavender script proclaimed COMING SOON: ANOTHER BEAUTIFUL SUNN-FLOUER HOME.

Norman usually ignored the lot any time we passed it, even when it grew busy with dusty orange Brannon Bros. Construction trucks constantly coming and going, with sweaty men in hard hats hammering and sawing and pouring cement into the evening hours. That morning, the crew had not yet arrived to begin their work, which was why Norman’s behavior shocked me even more than it would have otherwise.

By the time we’d arrived within twenty feet of the place, Norman erupted into a mad flurry of barks. He lunged forward, standing on his hind legs when his leash did not allow him to go any further.

He nearly jerked my arm out of its socket wanting to get onto that lot.

“Damn it, Norman, what’s gotten into you?” I said. “Stop it!”

I picked up my pace, jogging behind him to keep a hold on his thin metal chain. I feared it might snap any second.

“Norman, stop!” I shouted it this time.

Still, he paid me no mind. He seemed to have forgotten I was there at all. His barks tapered off into harsh growls as we reached the construction site, and I stumbled through the gate behind him.

“God, Norman… what is it?”

Never before had I heard the retriever make such vicious sounds. He was always so well-mannered, the best dog in the world. Not even in the presence of my ex-wife’s new beau had he ever displayed such ferocity, and to say Norman hated that man would have been the understatement of the century.

My heart slammed in my chest as he tugged me across the lot, past a blood-red wheelbarrow and a trio of crooked sawhorses. As the skeletal frame of the Clintons’ new home loomed above us—yeah, that was it, the Clintons, but why did I remember that now, when I couldn’t possibly care any less?—I suddenly realized something that made me feel cold, even though the day blazed bright and warm…

I was afraid.

Not in the way my favorite horror movies had filled me with harmless thrills when I was a kid. No, this was true fear. I realized I did not want to go any further. I did not want to see what had upset Norman so.

Because somehow I knew—already—that what we were about to find on the lot would be bad. Very bad.

I tugged on Norman’s leash. “Come on, boy. Let’s go. We’re not supposed to be here anyway…”

He didn’t seem to hear me. Still growling, he stalked across the construction site, toward the rear of the property, where a thin copse of trees separated our neighborhood from Harris City Park on the next street over.

“Norman? What the hell is wrong with you? What do you see?”

His growl cut short. He stood there, stiffly, staring at something across the lot. His nostrils flared.

“Norman.”

He glanced back at me, let out a little whine. His tail went limp, dangled between his legs as he took two tentative steps forward. Then he looked back at me again. Barked once. This time his bark was directed my way, but it wasn’t a threatening sound. It was a yelp of concern. A warning… as if he did not want me to come any closer.

I peered off toward the rear of the lot, holding one hand to my brow to shield my eyes from the sun. “Norman—”

And then I saw it. Up ahead. In the shadows of those trees…

Norman’s leash dropped from my hand.

A cool breeze swirled about the property. Off to my left, a gold candy bar wrapper twitched and danced across the dirt like something dying. Where scant minutes ago I had wiped sweat from my forehead, I shivered now. I felt the icy prickle of goosebumps rising on my forearms.

From somewhere far away, I could still hear Norman whining. It was a pitiful, hopeless sound.

“Norman,” I said. “S-stay. Stay right there.”

My knees grew weak. Still… somehow… I staggered forward. Toward the pale, crooked thing lying in the far corner of the construction site.

The world seemed to drop out from under me when I saw her sprawled there, in a big pile of sand behind a rusty cement mixer.

I covered my mouth with one hand. Salty tears blurred the awful sight before me, but they weren’t enough. Dear God, they would never be enough to make this go away…

“Oh, Jesus,” I said. “Jesus… ”

She was naked. Dead.

She could have been no older than nine or ten.

It was obvious from the unnatural angle of her head that her neck had been broken. A wormy rivulet of bright red blood ran from one nostril down to her chin, like an ugly crack in the face of an otherwise perfect porcelain doll.

Something else trickled out of her, too. Something thick and milky.

Down there.

Overhead, a bird chirped in the treetops. It was a maddening sound, a midsummer song far too merry for the scene at hand. From the Tomblins’ yard next door came the staccato chattering of an automatic water pistol, accompanied by a woman’s shrill laughter and pretend pleas for mercy. From further down the block: the high-pitched giggle of a toddler, in time with the metallic squeak-sigh-squeak-sigh of a backyard swing-set.

Meanwhile, my pulse banged in my temple like a tympani drum, louder than everything else.

Norman brushed against me. I flinched. Swayed. My breath burst out of me in a sick wheeze.

“Norman—”

The retriever’s eyes were sad, watery, as he crept toward the dead girl.

“Norman, no… d-don’t—”

He started licking her left foot.

I turned, vomited into a pile of discarded two-by-fours, and I didn’t stop making that same high-pitched whining noise my dog had been making minutes ago until I was all the way home, clamoring up the steps of my front porch, stumbling for the phone.

CHAPTER FOUR

In the prologue to my fifth novel, A Cold, Dark Place, a man finds the mutilated corpse of a little Asian boy shoved into a culvert behind his place of business as he closes up shop on Christmas Eve. Though he did not know the child, I remember describing the character’s terror as “a devastating sense of loss.” In that boy’s glazed, lifeless eyes, the man saw the inevitable mortality of his own small children. He recognized the depths of evil to which humans are capable of descending, and with his discovery came “an awful, black knowledge” that no one is ever truly safe. Not even the innocent.

I felt an inexplicable sense of déjà vu as I sat there in my living room, tormented by what I had found that morning. As if I had personally experienced all of this before. And I felt regret. A smothering depression like I had somehow brought this upon myself, as if I had created the events of this day by penning something similar eleven years before.

I shuddered. I kept seeing that little girl’s tiny white face. Her fixed gray pupils staring through me into eternity. Over and over and over again, replaying in my mind like a clip from some misogynistic film I had watched in spite of my better judgment and now prayed I could forget…

Two hours had passed since I found her, and still I heard the obscene rasp of my golden retriever’s coarse tongue lapping across the soft, dead flesh of her heel.

“Samantha,” I wept. “Oh, Sam… ”

Not since the day she was born had I so desperately wanted to hold my own daughter, to hug her and squeeze her and promise her I would never let go. I cursed myself for postponing our weekend together, for worrying about some stupid book when I should have savored every precious second I was allowed to spend with her. Guilt gnawed at my soul with hateful, razor-sharp fangs, but at the same time I found myself burning up inside with a primal, white-hot rage. No one would ever put his hands on my Samantha like someone had put his filthy hands on that poor child at the Clinton property…

Sweet Jesus, who could do such a thing?

I ran one trembling hand through my sweat-stiff hair, made a sound somewhere between a furious growl and a tortured moan.

In my right ear then, a deep male voice: “Sir?”

I could barely stop myself from lashing out at the faces looming over me. For the last few minutes, I had almost forgotten that I was not alone.

“Whoa. Easy there. You sure you’re gonna be okay, Mr. Holland?”

I took a deep breath. Forced myself to calm down and deal with the task at hand.

“Yeah,” I said. “I think so.” My voice was hoarse. “I don’t know.”

“Can we get you a glass of water? Maybe even something stronger, if you’d like to show us where you keep it?”

“N-no. Water. Please. Water sounds good. Thank you.”

I sat on my sofa, chewing on my bottom lip, my right knee bouncing up and down nervously. The two men who had been talking to me for the past hour or so were Detectives Erik Norton and Paul Hembry. Detective Norton was tall, thin, a couple years younger than myself. His ebony hair was unkempt; it belied his otherwise professional appearance, as if he had been too busy fighting crime all morning to worry about something so trivial as running a comb through his hair. He wore a navy blue blazer over a light gray shirt and black jeans. Shiny gold badge clipped to his belt, the bulge of a gun under one arm. His partner, Paul Hembry, was an overweight, balding gentleman who barely stood as tall as my chest. Hembry sported multiple chins and dark bags under his eyes that gave him the appearance of a tired old bulldog. He wore a rumpled blue Polo shirt, khaki slacks, and enough cologne to drown a small army. Every few minutes he dabbed at his sweaty forehead with a yellow handkerchief plucked from his back pocket.

Also on the premises lurked a fellow by the name of Officer Keith Whitmire. Whitmire stood watch on the other side of my front door while his superiors handled their business inside with me. Every few minutes I heard his footsteps on the porch, saw his wide shoulders pass by the window as he paced back and forth out there. Not only had he been the first officer on the scene, Whitmire was a neighbor of mine. He lived in the Spanish-style bungalow at the end of the cul-de-sac. Though I'd never gotten to know him very well, I had heard he worked in law enforcement simply because he enjoyed it, to maintain familial tradition as a fourth-generation police officer, and not out of necessity. Supposedly he had won a hefty chunk of change in the Georgia State Lottery several years ago, and now he was set for life. I always thought Whitmire looked just like Pete Rose, the shamed baseball player.

Someone coughed gently, startling me from my reverie. It might have been me. I wasn’t sure.

“Can I, uh, get that glass of water now?” I asked the two men before me.

“Sure,” said Detective Norton. Without taking his eyes off of me, he told his partner, “Get him a glass of water.”

Detective Hembry nodded my way before waddling down the hall and into my kitchen. He returned a minute or two later with one of my daughter’s favorite drinking glasses, a pink one with Minnie Mouse and Daisy Duck on the side.

Ice cubes chattered against the sides of the glass as he handed it to me. I took a sip, winced. The water tasted thick and nasty in my mouth. Like something gone bad.

Norton crossed his arms, cleared his throat. Watched my every move. The look on his face suggested I was making him late for an important appointment.

I set the glass on a shelf beside the sofa, gazed up at him.

“Her name was Rebecca Faye Lanning,” Norton announced. As if he’d been waiting for the perfect moment to fill me in, and this was it. I wondered what kind of reaction he was searching for, and if mine satisfied him. “She was nine years old.”

“God,” I said.

Hembry added, “We figure you scared the perp off. You and your dog.”

For the next minute or so, the only sound between us was the tingle and ping of the wind chimes swaying back and forth on my front porch. Their high yet mournful song came to us through my open living room window like memories of better times borne on a warm summer breeze.

“I assume you haven’t found him yet,” I said.

“We haven’t,” Norton replied. “Yet.”

“Our K-9 units plan to comb the park all evening,” said Hembry. “You had him cornered. Nowhere else he could have gone, except through the woods.”

“Right,” I said.

“Did you know the child?” Norton asked me.

“No.”

The detectives glanced at one another, but said nothing.

“Her family,” I said. “Do they live around here?”

My extremities felt oddly numb. My voice seemed to come from someone else, from hundreds of miles away.

Hembry nodded. “Tamarack Circle, next street over.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “I can’t imagine what they’re going through right now.”

“No one can,” said Norton.

For the first time I noticed how the taller detective’s otherwise perfectly trimmed eyebrows met in the middle. One hard, black line above his hard, black eyes. In my novels, such a trait would have been a telltale sign that Norton was a werewolf. A man who turned into a monster by the light of the full moon.

But this was real life. This wasn’t fiction. A human monster walked among us in broad daylight.

“We’ll get him,” said Hembry. “I promise you that. Maybe not today. It might not even be a month from now. But we will get the son of a bitch.”

“I hope so,” I said.

“If it’s the last thing we do,” said Norton.

I took a few more long, loud swallows from my glass of water. The way Norton kept staring at me made me uncomfortable. As if he were running some sort of sci-fi mind-scan on me in hopes of unveiling every deep, dark secret lurking within my past.

Sorry to disappoint you, I was tempted to tell the guy, but I’m about as boring as they come.

Then again, perhaps not.

Because I suddenly realized what was on Detective Norton’s mind, a split-second before his next words fell from between his lips. I knew what those glances they kept giving one another were all about, and why the detectives lingered in my living room, talking to yours truly when I was so sure they could have been doing more good out there on the streets searching for Rebecca Lanning’s killer. There was a bit of unfinished business here, as far as Detectives Norton and Hembry were concerned. Questions yet unanswered…

When I realized this, I felt cold. Like something inside of me had died.

“Mr. Holland,” Norton said, “please understand that this is standard procedure. It may seem irrelevant to you in regards to what has happened here today, but I must ask you to clarify a few things before we go any further with this investigation.”

I nodded. Shifted uncomfortably in my seat. Waited for it.

“On February 18, ——, you were charged with statutory rape. Is that correct?”

“That’s… correct,” I said, staring down at my lap.

“Mr. Holland? I didn’t hear you.”

“It’s true,” I said, louder this time. I gnashed my teeth, fought to keep my rising anger in check. “It’s… yeah, that’s right.”

“And you were convicted?”

“I pled guilty.”

But you already knew that, so why the hell are you asking? I wanted to scream at him.

The detectives glanced at one another for what felt like the ten-millionth time. Then they returned their attention to me.

“Would you care to tell us what happened?” Norton said, pulling a small notepad and ballpoint pen from inside his suit-coat.

“Is that really necessary?” I said. “I mean, I don’t see how this has anything to do with—”

“Please, Mr. Holland,” Detective Hembry interrupted me. He held up one hand, in a placating gesture. “As my partner said, this is standard procedure. We’re just talking here. But I think it would be best for all of us if you explain what happened in your own words. Otherwise, we have nothing to go on but court records. We would really like to hear your side of the story, sir.”

I shook my head, sighed. “It was… a stupid mistake I made when I was young. That’s all. I was a dumb kid. I screwed up. But then I took my punishment like a man. There’s nothing more to tell.”

Norton scribbled something in his notepad, but said nothing.

“I’ve never been in any kind of trouble with the law, before or since,” I explained. And then I insisted again, “I was young. It was a stupid mistake.”

“Duly noted,” Norton mumbled.

“I should have known this would come up sooner or later.”

“Tell us what happened, Mr. Holland,” said Detective Hembry. “Please.”

And so I did. I left out nothing. I told them about a ravishing young lady named Bridget Prescott… about that fateful Valentine’s Day years ago when I ended up in the hospital, my body broken and bruised… about my brush with the law when I was twenty years old, and the price I had paid for thinking I knew all of life’s answers when I was barely old enough to understand its questions in the first place. It wasn’t easy, being forced to revisit this part of my past I had tried to bury, but I had no choice. Halfway through my story, I decided it was for the best. If either of these men thought for a second that I was hiding anything from them—anything—they would cease to believe a word I said.

When I finished, Detective Norton slid his pad and pen back into his jacket, said, “Okay, then. Thank you for clearing that up.”

“Is this going to be a problem?” I asked him. “I think I have a right to know if y—”

“Nah,” said Hembry.

“It shouldn’t be,” said Norton.

Outside, on the porch, I heard Officer Whitmire say something. I could not make out his words or see to whom he was speaking. A radio squawked briefly, and that was followed by another quick murmur of conversation. The policeman’s footsteps clunked from one side of the porch to the other, then back again.

I wondered if he had been eavesdropping on my story through the open window.

Detective Hembry, meanwhile, had wandered out of my living room, into the hallway. He stood outside my office now, his hands jingling change in his pockets as he peered into the room. Beyond his considerable belly I could see the bookshelves housing all of my first and foreign editions along one wall, and a framed poster of the cover art for my last novel, Slow Burn (my biggest seller to date), centered above my desk. To the right of that was the window through which I peered, daydreaming, each time I came down with a bad case of procrastination disguised as writer’s block. The screensaver on my computer monitor was a montage of old black-and-white Marilyn Monroe photographs. Beside it, the CPU tower hummed quietly, reminding me that I needed to get back to work, like, yesterday.

Hembry looked back at me with a sly grin, as if we now shared some momentous secret. “Where you write your books?”

“Yeah.”

“Fascinating.”

He took a minute to dab at his brow with his yellow handkerchief before turning to the closed door on the other side of the hallway. He chuckled at the sign posted there. It was a homemade affair fashioned from a rainbow of construction paper, crayons, and glitter: NO BOYS ALLOWED (EXEPT DAD)!!!

“My daughter’s room,” I said.

Hembry shot yet another glance at his partner. Norton stared at me.

“She lives with her mother,” I felt the need to add, though I didn’t know why. “We’re divorced.”

“I see.”

“How old is your daughter?” Norton asked me.

“She’ll be twelve next month.”

Hembry jiggled the doorknob to Samantha’s room. It was unlocked, but he didn’t try to open the door. He just stood there jiggling the knob for a few seconds as if he liked the sound it made.

I frowned.

Finally, the chubby detective turned to his partner.

“I think we’ve got all the information we need here,” he said. “You ready to roll?”

Norton reached into his suit-coat, pulled out his notepad again and flipped it to the first page, where he had scribbled my phone number earlier. “We can reach you at this number if we have any further questions, correct?”

“I’m always home,” I said.

“Very good.”

I stood to show them out. A tad too eagerly, perhaps.

As I led them to the door, I heard two muffled barks from my backyard. I reminded myself to go check on Norman after the detectives left. See how he was holding up. Hopefully much better than his master.

“By the way, Mr. Holland,” Detective Hembry said then, lingering in my foyer, “I did want to ask you…”

“Yes?”

“Would you mind… er… that is…”

“What is it, Detective?”

“I don’t suppose you could sign something for me, could you?”

“Um, sure,” I said, a bit taken aback. I hadn’t pegged either of these guys as horror fans. “I guess I could do that.”

Hembry pulled something from his back pocket, held it out to me. It was a dog-eared copy of my third novel, The Ancient Ones. The first printing, with the garish red-eyed demon thing on the cover. One of only two books I have written which I can truly say I loathe. The critics were right about that one.

“I’d appreciate the hell out of it,” he said. “If you’re sure you wouldn’t mind?”

I took it from him, opened the cover.

After a quick, self-conscious grin in his partner’s direction, Hembry said, “Make it to ‘Paul,’ please?”

He handed me a pen, and I clenched it so tightly my knuckles turned bone-white.

TO DETECTIVE PAUL, I scrawled in wide, angry letters upon the title page, DON’T LET THE BAD GUYS GET YOU!

When I was done, I shoved the book back into his hands.

Hembry ogled his newfound prize.

At last I stepped back, preparing to slam the door behind them, but Detective Norton stopped in the threshold. He turned, held up one long, skinny finger.

“There is one last thing, Mr. Holland,” he said.

I kept my hand on the door. Gave him an exhausted oh-boy-there’s-more-I-can’t-wait expression.

“Just to eliminate you as a suspect beyond a shadow of a doubt,” Norton said, that hard, black line above his eyes looking harder and blacker than ever, “you wouldn’t have a problem with giving us a DNA sample, would you? If we were to request such a thing in the next few days?”

I sighed. Shook my head. Stared at the floor. Wanted to scream at them both to get the hell off my property.

He said, “At this point, it’s not something you have to do. But understand that we can get a search warrant, if necessary. Then you would have no choice.”

“No,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

“Of course he’ll do it,” said Hembry, slapping his partner on the back. “Why wouldn’t he?”

They left without another word, their heels clicking down my front steps as they stalked toward their shiny black Buick at the curb.

Officer Keith Whitmire turned to me, nodded but did not speak, before rushing to follow them. He spoke with the two detectives briefly, and then they got into their car.

I closed my front door, tried not to worry about the rest of my neighbors gathered on the opposite side of the street.

I counted a dozen of them out there, give or take. Pointing. Whispering. Watching the detectives leave my home. Shouting troubled questions toward the cop who lived at the end of our block.

Whitmire joined the throng, and he wasted no time obliging them as soon as his superiors drove away.

I realized I did not care at all.

The only thing on my mind at that moment was the bathroom at the end of the hall.

I covered my mouth, made a retching noise as I ran.

For the second time that day, I knew I was about to be sick.

CHAPTER FIVE

Poinsettia Lane was changing.

Once upon a time, my neighborhood had seemed so perfect in every way. Now, the street outside my home had become a serpentine black path upon which I never again wanted to step foot, lest it lead me toward more awful truths. Beneath every immaculately groomed yard was buried an abominable secret, and behind every door lurked another ugly sin.

A child had been raped. Murdered.

I did not want to believe it. None of us did.

Because things like this… they did not happen here.

For several hours after Norman and I found Rebecca Lanning’s broken body, Poinsettia Lane was a maelstrom of activity. Police vehicles sped up and down my block—sometimes with sirens wailing, lights flashing, other times not. Men in dark blue SHERIFF’S DEPT. jackets ran past my house, shouting orders in their walkie-talkies as they went. The distant barking of police dogs filled Harris City Park behind my neighborhood, and occasionally I heard Norman add to the commotion from our backyard, as if pleading with his canine brethren to find the monster responsible for this madness. At one point I felt as much as heard the staccato rumble of a helicopter overhead, like the flapping of gargantuan batwings on the horizon.

Everything was wrong. So wrong.

It would never be right again.

Throughout it all, my neighbors stood watching the chaos from their own patios or from behind screen doors, their faces sweaty ghost-masks of worry. In the bedroom, my phone rang and rang and rang. And then it rang some more. And when the land-line wasn’t ringing, my cell constantly buzz-buzz-buzzed, shimmying across the desk in my office like some agitated bug.

I finally took the old rotary phone off the hook. Killed the cell for the rest of the day.

I tried not to despise those who were trying so hard to contact me. I wished I could be one of them.

At last, I closed my door and locked it when a large white van with squeaky brakes pulled into my driveway. WKLS/CHANNEL 10 NEWS, read the logo on its side.

A few minutes later I heard footsteps on my front porch. A knock, and a sexy female voice called my name.

“Mr. Holland? Staci Gayle-Mathis, from WKLS News. I’d like to ask you a few questions, if I may. Hello? We know you’re in there, Mr. Holland…”

She knocked again. Impatiently.

“Mr. Holland?”

But I did not answer.

Because somehow, even then… I knew things were about to get worse.

CHAPTER SIX

“I’m so sorry to hear what happened, Andy,” Ben Souther said the following morning, as I hefted a fat bag of garbage to the end of my driveway.

My next-door neighbor startled me at first. I hadn’t seen him standing there in the shade of his front porch, beyond his wife’s massive azalea, lilac, and rhododendron bushes separating our properties.

“Oh,” I said. “’Morning, Ben.”

“I heard you found her. My God, that had to be horrible…”

I said nothing, merely offered him a sad little smile. I turned to head back inside.

“Hey. Andy. Hold up. You, uh, got a couple minutes?”

“What do you need, Ben?” I said.

“I’ve got a cold beer over here with your name on it. Thought maybe we could chew the fat for a few.”

My novel was waiting. My deadline drew closer. Both my agent and my publisher grew more and more impatient. But I knew I was still too shaken to get any real work done.

I shrugged. “Why the hell not.”

Ben had a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon open and ready for me by the time I joined him on his front porch. Beads of condensation dripped off of it onto my hand. It felt good. Tasted even better.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Don’t mention it.”

Ben smiled at me as he eased into his favorite rocking chair, but I couldn’t help thinking his kind expression seemed forced, somehow. Fake. No, surely I had imagined that. I liked Ben. He had always reminded me of one of my favorite uncles from childhood. He was a good man.

He motioned for me to sit. “Take a load off, my friend.”

Ben Souther was about twenty-five years my senior, and while we didn’t have much in common other than a taste for ice-cold brewskis on hot summer days and a love for the Atlanta Braves (at least when they were playing well), we had hit if off nicely from the first day we met. Ben was a retired insurance fraud investigator, a well-read gentleman who spoke with a slight Wisconsin accent. He was stocky but not obese, with a full head of curly silver hair most men his age would envy. A faded, barely legible tattoo on his left forearm read U.S. NAVY. Ben favored flannel shirts and blue jeans held up by colorful suspenders, and he always wore thick wire-rimmed glasses that turned a funky purplish-red in the light, a tint so dark I couldn’t remember the last time I had glimpsed more than a hint of my next-door neighbor’s eyes.

“Did you know her parents?” He got right to the point, after I made myself comfortable on his wife’s porch swing.

“No,” I replied. “You?”

“Not really. Marianne’s spoken with her mother once or twice at the salon. Her father’s a lineman for the power company, if memory serves. I don’t know them personally, but… Christ… it sure makes you stop and think, doesn’t it?”

I looked at him over my beer, my brow furrowed.

“It can happen to anyone,” he said. “Anytime. You know?”

“Scary,” I said.

“You’re damn right it is,” Ben said. “Soon as I heard, I had to call my grandkids. All nine of ’em. Just to know they were safe and sound.”

I nodded, took another long pull on my beer. Thought about Samantha and wondered what she was doing at that very moment. I said a silent prayer for her, hoping she was safe. Happy.

“Did you get my messages?” Ben asked. “I called several times, but I guess you weren’t answering the phone.”

“No,” I said. “I’m sorry, Ben. Damn thing kept ringing off the hook all day…”

“Looked like a lot going on over there. What a terrible mess. I assume the police were getting some sort of official statement from you?”
“Yeah.”

“It was all over the news.”

“I don’t watch TV,” I said. “But I figured as much.”

Ben stared down at his lap. Brushed an imaginary speck of lint off one knee.

“I, uh, should probably tell you that… they did mention who found her.”

I felt a sharp pang of dread in my gut, but tried not to appear too rattled. “They did.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Wonderful,” I groaned.

“Saw the Channel 10 van in your driveway, too,” Ben said. “You didn’t talk to her?”

“Hell, no.”

“Can’t say as I blame you. That’s probably for the best.”

We both peered out over the street for the next minute or two. Drank from our bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon as if the answers to all of the world’s problems lay within their frosty contents. Somewhere down the street a motorcycle engine revved and died, revved and died. A cat meowed. The fattest bumblebee I had ever seen buzzed and flitted about Marianne Souther’s flowerbed a few feet in front of us.

Ben leaned toward me then, and in a voice barely above a whisper, he said, “Word travels fast in a place like this, Andy. I hope you know, a lot o’ questions are probably gonna be coming your way in the next few days.”

“Right,” I said.

“Just thought I’d warn you.”

“I understand.”

Ben cleared his throat, stared down into the mouth of his bottle.

“Something else on your mind, old man?” I asked him.

He chuckled, but an uneasy tremor lurked in my neighbor’s laugh. “Is it that obvious?”

“I guess it is.”

“Well… hell, we’re all friends here, so I won’t beat around the bush. I’ll just come right out and ask.”

“Okay…?”

“I’m not trying to be nosy, Andy. I’m just curious…”

I waited for it. Wasn’t sure what I was waiting for, exactly.

“Is it true,” Ben asked me, “what they said on the news?”

“Regarding…?”

“Something about a, uh… a spot of trouble you got yourself into when you were young…”

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “They actually brought that up?”

“Yeah,” Ben said. “They mentioned it.”

I sighed. “I don’t have anything to hide, Ben. But that was nineteen years ago. It doesn’t have a thing to do with that little girl. It was just a stupid mistake I made when I was a kid.”

“Hmm,” Ben said. “What I figured.”

“I can’t believe they brought that up…”

I brought my bottle to my lips, but did not drink. I suddenly felt very uncomfortable, wished I could be anywhere else in the world besides on Ben Souther’s front porch.

“We think we know it all at that age, don’t we, Andy?” my next-door neighbor asked me.
“Yeah,” I replied. “I suppose we do.”

Neither of us said anything for the next few minutes. Ben sat there staring at me for what felt like forever from behind his dark glasses. At least, I thought he was staring at me. I couldn’t be sure. Because I could not see his eyes.

I fidgeted in my seat. The porch swing creaked beneath me.

Finally he looked away, took another quick sip of his beer. Some of the frothy liquid trickled down his chin. He wiped it away with the back of one big hand.

“Person who could do something like that to a child, Andy… he’s not even human. He’s a goddamn monster.”

“True.”

“Then again, I suppose it’s like a wise man once said…”I knew what came next. One of Ben’s trademark quotations. My neighbor seemed to have one for every occasion, and they were always so apt. I often imagined Ben had a special room somewhere inside his home stocked with shelves upon shelves of hefty tomes filled with nothing but famous (as well as not-so-famous) quotations, and that was all he did in his spare time—read them from cover to cover, committing every line to memory so he would have a quote handy whenever and wherever he needed it. Like now. Here. In the context of our troubled conversation.

“ ‘Everyone is a moon,’ ” Ben Souther said, “ ‘and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.’ ”

“Mark Twain,” I said.

He gave me a little “cheers” gesture with his bottle before tipping it back to finish it off.

Again I gazed out over Poinsettia Lane. The sun was bright and hot. The air smelled of honeysuckle and fresh-mown grass. A distant tinge of motor oil. Despite the tragedy that had turned our neighborhood upside-down, this Friday morning had begun like any other. Or had it? I wondered if we were all just going through the motions, pretending we would make it through this. When Joe and Eileen Tuttle passed us in their shiny purple P.T. Cruiser, they did not look our way, though I noticed as they cruised by my house they stared conspicuously in that direction. Doc McFarland jogged by, sans headphones for once, but if he saw us he did not wave. Across the road, Freddy Morgan and his next-door neighbor, Lorne Childress, hammered away at the new deck Morgan had been building out front of his place. The sounds of their construction echoed up and down the street like someone pounding out a sloppy rhythm on a cheap set of drums. Once I caught Morgan squinting in our direction, about the time he stopped to remove his faded Cheap Trick T-shirt and wipe his sweaty face with it, but when I raised my bottle of beer toward the man he returned to his work with an urgency that hinted at something more than an honest desire to finish the project at hand.

I frowned, looked back at Ben to find him staring at me again from behind his purple glasses.

“Those detectives have any idea who did it?” he asked me.

“Not yet,” I replied. “Far as I know.”

“Do you think it could have been someone local?”

“I have no idea, Ben.”

“Our man Keith thinks it was. Says from the looks of things it might even turn out to be—God forbid—someone we know.”

“Let’s hope not,” I said.

When I offered nothing further, my neighbor crossed his arms and said, “Whatever the case, I just hope they catch the bastard before too long. And pardon my Japanese, but I hope he fuckin’ fries.”

“You and me both,” I said. “You and me both.”

Across the street, Freddy Morgan had climbed down from his deck-in-progress to turn on the radio in his truck. A classic rock station. Lorne Childress joined him in the driveway a few seconds later, and to the tune of Pink Floyd’s “Have a Cigar” the two men helped themselves to beers of their own from a cooler in the back of the Ram.

Ben tore his eyes off of me long enough to glance their way.

When he threw up one hand, both men smiled, returning his wave. Morgan shouted a friendly: “What’s up, Big Ben!”

My face grew hot. I felt a lump form in my throat the size of one of Marianne’s prized chrysanthemums.

I stood, finished off my beer in three quick gulps, and slammed the bottle down on the porch railing a bit too loudly.

“Thanks for the beer,” I said. “I gotta go.”

Ben looked hurt. He rose to his feet, wasted no time following me to the edge of the porch.

“What’s the hurry?” he said. “There’s plenty more beer in the fridge.”

“Thanks, but no thanks, Ben,” I said. “I’ve got a book to finish by the end of next month, and I’m barely halfway through the first draft.”

“Hard at work on a new one, huh? What’s this one called?”

“A Feast of Souls.”

“A Feast of Souls,” Ben said. “Classy.”

I slowed, unsure whether or not I had detected a hint of sarcasm in my neighbor’s tone.

“If it’s all the same to you, my friend,” he said, “I think I’ll stick with my Tom Clancy novels.”

I nodded, but did not respond. I just continued on, slump-shouldered, toward home. I stared at my feet as I walked.

“Hey, Andy?” Ben called after me again, as I stepped off of his property and onto mine.

“Yeah?”

“Promise me you won’t take this the wrong way, okay? But at a time like this, I can’t help thinking maybe Oliver Goldsmith was right…”

I swallowed a sick taste in my mouth. Waited for it.

“ ‘Do not let us make imaginary evils,’ ” Ben quoted, “ ‘when we have so many real ones to encounter.’ ”

I stopped in my tracks. Turned. Glared up at my neighbor.

“No offense, Andy,” he said, from the shadows of his front porch. “I’m just saying… with everything that’s happened…”

“No offense taken, Ben,” I lied.

I left him standing there.

From the corner of my eye, I could see the two men across the street watching my every move as well. One of them mumbled something to the other, and that was followed by a low, mean chuckle.

“Talk to you later, Andy,” Ben Souther said, as I stomped up my front steps. “Don’t be a stranger, hear?”

CHAPTER SEVEN

A kind, accommodating, but still inhuman computer voice: “YOU HAVE… THIRTEEN… NEW MESSAGES. LISTEN TO ALL MESSAGES NOW?”

YES.

***

BEEEEEP.

“FIRST MESSAGE—YESTERDAY, 10:57 A.M.”

“Andy? Ben. Jesus, I just heard. Jesus. Call me. I need to know you’re okay. Or just come on over. I’ll be home all day.”

BEEEEEP.

“SECOND MESSAGE—YESTERDAY, 1:00 P.M.”

“Andy. Joe Tuttle here. Umm… Eileen and I were just wondering what in the world’s going on over there. We heard about what happened and… my God, I don’t know what to say, man. We’ll be stepping out for a late lunch in a few, but we’ll be back around three. Give us a ring.”

BEEEEEP.

“THIRD MESSAGE—YESTERDAY, 2:22 P.M.”

“Andy, it’s Mona. Are you all right? Gosh, I… I heard about that little girl, and… my dear Lord, this is too terrible to comprehend. You know where I live if you need to talk to anyone, okay? Okay. Ta-ta for now, Andy.”

BEEEEEP.

“FOURTH MESSAGE—YESTERDAY, 3:10 P.M.:

“Hi, Mr. Holland. This is Staci Gayle-Mathis, with the WKLS Channel 10 Evening News? I regret we missed you this morning. I would like to talk to you about a possible interview, when you have the time. Could you please give me a call at your earliest convenience? 555-8345. Thank you.”

BEEEEEP.

“FIFTH MESSAGE—YESTERDAY, 4:04 P.M.”

“Hello, Mr. Holland. My name is James Melnath. Mr. Holland, I’m writing an article about the Rebecca Lanning murder for tomorrow’s edition of the Harris City Tribune, and if possible I would like to ask you a few questions. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes of your time. If you could call me at 555-4777, that would be great. Again, that’s 555-4777. Ask for Jim. Thanks!”

BEEEEEP.

“SIXTH MESSAGE—YESTERDAY, 5:14 P.M.”

“Mr. Writer Fella. Sal Friedman here. Yeesh, I hate talking to these goddamn machines. You have no idea. But, hey, uh… I heard about what happened. Sweet Mother Mary, it’s hard to believe something like this could happen here. Anyway… give me a ring when you get a chance, will ya? That’s all.”

BEEEEEP.

“SEVENTH MESSAGE—YESTERDAY, 6:07 P.M.”

“Andy? Ben. Are you there? Sorry to bother you again, but… we need to chat, man. Really. Drop by tomorrow morning. We’ll have a beer.”

BEEEEEP.

“EIGHTH MESSAGE—YESTERDAY, 6:13 P.M.”

“Did I mention I hate talking to a machine? Christ. You really should turn on the news, Mr. Writer Fella.”

BEEEEEP.

“NINTH MESSAGE—YESTERDAY, 6:36 P.M.”

“Andrew? What in the world is going on over there? God. I just heard. I can’t believe it. That poor little girl. Is it true you found her—what? Sam, honey, no. Hold on a sec, can’t you see I’m on the phone? Yes, it’s your father. No, it’s just his voice-mail. Andy, I have to go. Sam, turn off the television. I don’t know why he’s on the news. Of course everything’s okay, baby, he’s just—”

BEEEEEP.

“TENTH MESSAGE—YESTERDAY, 7:09 P.M.”

“Andy? Mona again. I was watching the news tonight, and I’m awfully disturbed by some of the things they’re insinuating. It’s almost as if… gosh, I can’t even repeat it, it’s so dreadful. I hope you’re well, dear. Please, please give me a call. Ta-ta.”

BEEEEEP.

“ELEVENTH MESSAGE—TODAY, 7:46 A.M.”

“Andy? Ben. You up yet? Check out this morning’s Tribune.”

BEEEEEP.

“TWELFTH MESSAGE—TODAY, 8:14 A.M.”

“—know where the hell he is, Francine, but I think it’s about damn time we got some answers, don’t you? He can’t expect the rest of us to sit around whil—oh, uhh, hello? Holland? Hello? Um… ah, screw it.”

BEEEEEP.

“THIRTEENTH MESSAGE. TODAY, 8:21 A.M.”

“Mr. Writer Fella? You read the paper yet? This isn’t good at all, my friend. This isn’t good at all…”

BEEEEEEEEEEP.

***

“CONFIRM: ERASE ALL MAIL MESSAGES?”

YES.

CHAPTER EIGHT

I could wait no longer. I had to speak with my daughter. Even if it meant calling Karen, interrupting her wonderful weekend on Lake Jocassee in Jason Burke’s precious love boat.

“Andy!” Karen exclaimed as soon as she picked up. “I tried to call you a hundred times last night, but you never answered your phone. I tried the land-line and your cell. My God… are you okay?”

If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought I heard genuine concern in her tone. For me. Something about that made me even more depressed.

In the background, on her end of the line, I could hear my ex-wife’s new fiancé saying something about “catching a whopper.” Beneath that: Fleetwood Mac singing “Little Lies” on a tinny radio… the lonely call of a loon… the slosh-slap rhythm of the lake against the hull of the S.S. HOMEWRECKER…

. . . and a child’s sweet, sweet laughter.

An invisible fist gripped my heart. Squeezed.

Karen said, “I can’t imagine what it must have been like. To be the one who found her…”

“It was awful, Karen,” I said. “I’ll never forget the sight of that little girl… lying there… as long as I live.”

“How in the world did you find her?”

Briefly, I filled her in on the details of my ill-fated walk with Norman.

“Jesus, Andy. I don’t know what to say. Are you… I hope you’re okay?”

“I will be,” I said. “It’s that poor child’s family I’m worried about.”

Neither of us said anything for one long, awkward minute or so. I knew we were thinking the same thing, though: What if it had been our daughter? What if some sick fuck had hurt Samantha? How would we ever begin to cope with such a thing?

Finally, Karen said, “I’m sorry, Andy. I’m so sorry.”

“Me too.”

“No, I mean it. I’m sorry.”

“Me too.”

She sighed. Sounded as if she were about to say something else, but then her next words died on her lips. I imagined my ex-wife twirling a lock of her wavy brown hair around one finger, like she always did when she was feeling stressed. I wondered if she was wearing her bright blue bikini with the little black turtles on it, the one that had always been my favorite and hers too ’cause she said the way I stared at her when she wore that bikini was the same way I had stared at her when we first started dating.

Instantly I forced such thoughts from my mind, for down that road lay… well, things I didn’t care to think about.

Like whether or not it was his favorite bikini, too.

As if on cue, I heard the captain of the S.S. INFIDELITY whisper in the background, “Babe? Who is it? Is everything okay?”

“It’s Andy,” she told him.

“Oh.”

I bit my tongue. Almost hard enough to draw blood.

“Karen?” I said.

“Hmm?”

“You know I don’t watch TV,” I said. “Hardly ever. But tell me the truth…”

“Okay.”

“Do I even want to know what they said on the news last night?”

Her silence was enough to answer my question.

“How bad was it?” I groaned.

“It was bad, Andy. Pretty bad.”

“Shit.”

“I wish I could tell you otherwise. But that poor child wasn’t even the focus of the story. Not really. It was… you. And what you do for a living.”

“Shit,” I said again.

“ ‘Local author of the macabre discovers real-life horror practically in his own back yard,’ ” Karen recited. “Or some such nonsense.”

“God damn it.”

“I know. I was furious.”

“Thank you,” I said. “And the other thing?” I already knew the answer from my conversation with Ben Souther, but I asked it anyway. “The thing on my record?”

“They mentioned that too. Once or twice.”

I took a deep breath, let it out slowly. Ran one hand through my sweat-soaked hair.

Meanwhile, from the sounds of it, Samantha was having the time of her eleven-year-old life aboard the S.S. TAKE-MY-WIFE-PLEASE. In the background I could hear the long, ratcheting click-whirrrrr of a fishing line being cast into Lake Jocassee, a distant splash…

And more ecstatic giggles.

My daughter’s laughter was the greatest sound in the world. It warmed my soul like beautiful music. Lifted my spirits like a drug. Yet, at the same time, it filled me with the most heartrending regret I had ever known. Sam might as well have been a million miles away, on another planet. And she sounded so happy there. Had she ever been that happy with me, I wondered? Had either of them? I tried to remember the last time my ex-wife or my daughter had sounded so carefree—so full of bliss—when we were together. Had I neglected my family by focusing first and foremost on my career, by fretting endlessly over this deadline or that contractual obligation? Writing is such a solitary job, after all. What if I had pushed them both away—first Karen, and now my little girl?

No. Please, God, I prayed, don’t let that be true.

Choking back a sob, I said, “Can I… may I talk to Sam now, please?”

“Of course you can,” Karen replied. “Hold on a second.”

I sniffled softly as I waited to hear my daughter’s voice. Dried my eyes with the sleeve of my shirt.

“Sam, honey?” Karen said. “It’s your father.”

“Yay!” I heard Sam exclaim. “Dad!”

The metallic clatter of a fishing pole, dropped and forgotten. Hurried footsteps across fancy hardwood deck.

“How is he holding up?” I heard Jason Burke ask Karen, as if he might suddenly cease to exist if she didn’t tell him my business right this second. And I could tell by their hushed conversation that she wasted no time obliging the prick.

But I did not care at all about that once my daughter came on the line. At the sound of her voice, I smiled wider than I would have ever thought possible.

“Hi, Dad!” Samantha said, coming through loud and clear. She always thought she had to yell to be heard on her mother’s cell phone.

“Hey, baby!” I said. “How are you?”

“Fine. Jason was just showing me how to cast a line. He says I’m a born fisherwoman!”

“Neat,” I said.

“Yeah! And you know what else he told me?”

“What’s that?”

“He said the Lord Jesus taught that we should be fishers of men.”

“Fishers of men,” I said. “Really.”

“Yep. It says that in the Book of Matt.”

“Mark, sweetheart,” I heard Burke correct her in the background. “The Book of Mark.”

My free hand clenched into a pale fist. A sick little snicker slipped out of me, and I tried to stifle it with a cough, but I knew it didn’t sound at all convincing. Without a doubt, that was the most peculiar thing about this whole mess with my adulterous ex and her new beau—the fact that Jason Burke claimed to be a devout “Christian.” In his spare time, he was a youth minister at the First Methodist Church across town. Every time I thought about that, I felt like laughing so hard I might rupture something inside of me. Because it was downright hilarious. I wondered what his precious doctrines said about infidelity? About fornication? With the exception of my wedding day and my father’s funeral six years ago, I had not stepped foot inside a place of worship for nearly three decades… yet I was quite sure I remembered a Golden Rule, maybe one of the Ten Commandments, which clearly stated, “Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s wife.”

Fishers of men indeed. Because Karen sure as hell swallowed Bible-Man’s bait and came swimming back for more.

“Guess what, Dad?” Samantha yelled in my ear, jerking me out of my reverie. “Jason already caught six fish! Can you believe that?”

“Did he now?” I said.

“Yep. He got four itty-bitty ones, a sorta-kinda medium one, and a real whopper.”

“Wow.”

“We’re gonna cook the whopper tonight and eat it.”

I said, “It sounds like you’re having a blast, Sam. I’m glad.”

“It’s pretty cool, I guess,” she said. “But, Dad…?”

“Yeah?”
“I really wish you were here. It’s not the same without you.”

Tears burned in my eyes. From Samantha’s end of the line, the sound of massive sails flapping and popping in the afternoon breeze taunted me like evil nylon laughter.

“I wish I could be there too, baby,” I said, my voice cracking.

“Maybe we can go fishing sometime, Dad. Just me and you. Wouldn’t that be cool?”

“It would be super cool,” I said. “We’ll do that.”

“Really? Promise?”

“Cross my heart and hope to die. Stick a fish hook in my eye.”

Sam giggled like that was the funniest thing she ever heard. “Owwwch!”

I sniffled again, but laughed with her.

“I heard them talking about you on TV,” she said then, catching me by surprise.

“You did?”

“Yeah. They showed a picture of your house, and even some of your books! Mommy wouldn’t let me watch it, though. She made me go to my room. What’s going on, Dad? Are you okay?”

“Sure I’m okay,” I said. “Nothing’s going on, pumpkin. The news was… um… they were just doing a little piece on my latest book. That’s all. Everything’s fine.”

“Oh,” Sam said. “Good.”

Lying to my daughter made me really want to stab a fish hook into my eye. As deep as it would go.

“Well, Dad,” Sam said a few seconds later. “I’m gonna go try to catch some more, okay?”

“Okay, sweetie,” I said. “You have a wonderful time this weekend, and I will see you next Wednesday?”

“I can’t wait,” she replied.

“I love you, Samantha.”

“I love you, too.”

And with a dull click, she was gone.

I couldn’t help it. The second I hung up the phone, I began to cry harder and louder than I had ever cried in my life.

I didn’t stop for at least an hour. Maybe even two.

CHAPTER NINE

At this point in my story, if my name were Benjamin Souther, I would undoubtedly conjure up some perfect quotation for the task at hand.

Perhaps I would recite the words of writer Henry Mencken, who said, “It is hard to believe a man is telling the truth when you know you would lie if you were in his place.”

Hank, old boy, I’m sure my neighbors would agree with you there.

Or how about this, from Winston Churchill: “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”

I can vouch for that.

Or maybe I should quote none other than our esteemed sixteenth President, Mr. Abraham Lincoln: “Truth is generally the best vindication against slander.”

Right.

Honest Abe didn’t know shit.

***

In any event, I suppose I should quit stalling.

Here, now, is my truth…

I’m talking about the skeleton in my closet. My dark secret that I so foolishly believed I had put behind me almost two decades ago.

I should have known the sins of your past always come back to haunt you.

More often than not, with a vengeance.

***

In November of — I had just turned twenty years old. For the first year-and-a-half after I graduated from high school, I flipped burgers at various fast-food joints with no immediate plans for a more prosperous career in mind. Well, none that required I punch a clock every day. It was only because of my parents’ constant nagging that I decided to further my education at all. They insisted that a few courses at a local community or technical college would teach me some sort of trade I could use in the “real world,” and I had to admit—albeit begrudgingly—that Mom and Dad were right.

Problem was, I never possessed any desire to attend college. I did not think it was necessary, because for as far back as I can remember, there was only one thing I wanted to do with my life. And a fancy degree was not essential to making my dream a reality.

I wanted to be a writer. A best-selling novelist.

Ultimately, parental demands prevailed. According to my father, if I wished to continue “living under his roof,” I would find something “to fall back on.” In case “this writing thing didn’t work out.”

So at some point during those last few weeks of ——, I visited the local community college with my high school transcripts in hand, hoping to find a few classes that might sustain my interest enough to at least keep me from dropping out after only a couple weeks. Journalism. Technical writing, perhaps. Maybe a course on computer programming, which my high school guidance counselor had informed me was the “wave of the future.”

Hell, I would have enrolled in Basket-Weaving 101 if it got my old man off my back.

As much as I did not want to—I believed the time I wasted studying for classes my heart wasn’t even into could be better spent polishing up my first novel, in preparation for submitting it to potential agents—I did it to appease my parents. If I could just keep them happy until I received that first big publishing contract, I decided, everyone would win.

But then I took an unexpected detour on my road to success.

All my plans for the future were put on hold the moment I met Bridget Prescott.

***

I was headed back to the parking lot after paying my tuition in the main office when I spotted her. She sat on a bench outside the school library, her legs crossed demurely, her thighs barely covered (despite the season’s chill) in the shortest, sexiest miniskirt I had ever seen. She was lost in a book, oblivious to the chaos around her, to the din of students rushing back and forth across the campus courtyard.

Her hair was black as sin, so black it was almost blue, and it flowed all the way into her lap. It fell over her face as she sat there engrossed in her book, so all I could see of her features at first were her lips. They were full, red as rose petals. The kind of perfect, pouty lips you want to reach out and brush with your fingertips just to see if they’re real.

As I walked by her, I got a closer look at the title of the dog-eared paperback in her hands: ’Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King.

I couldn’t help but grin.

Was she a kindred soul, I wondered?

“Kick-ass book,” I said, slowing on the walkway to stand above her. “One of my personal faves.”

Normally, I would not have initiated conversation with a woman so drop-dead gorgeous if my life depended on it. Throughout high school, I’d had a reputation for being extremely shy, almost but not quite a wallflower. But something told me to go for it. That this was right. Meant to be.

I should have run screaming. Should have told that something to go straight to Hell.

She marked her place in the book with one finger, closed it. Looked up at me and returned my smile, shielding the most beautiful blue eyes I had ever seen from the sunlight with her free hand.

“I like it a lot so far,” she said.

“I just finished reading it for the third time,” I told her. “I can’t get enough of King’s work.”

“My favorite so far is Carrie,” she said.

“His first one? Great stuff.”

“Yeah. And DePalma’s movie kicked ass too. Sissy Spacek owned that role.”

I had to remind myself to close my mouth. Otherwise I might have stood there for the next few minutes with it hanging open, collecting flies. I couldn’t believe my ears…

Holy shit. She was a kindred soul! There was no turning back for me now.

Again she showed me a smile that made my heart flutter. But then, after a few more seconds, she brushed a lock of her raven hair behind her ear and gave me a look like she really wanted to get back to her book.

I quickly broke the silence between us by sticking my hand in her face.

Smooth…

“I’m sorry,” I said. “My name’s Andy, by the way. Andy Holland.”

“Hi, Andy,” she replied. “I’m Bridget.”

“You know… Bridget… if you like this kinda stuff, I oughta let you read the novel I’m working on sometime. I think you’d dig it.”

“You’re writing a book? Oh, now that’s cool.”

“I’m trying to, anyway. I started it in the tenth grade, but I’ve only been getting really serious about it for the last year or so.”

“What’s it called?”

“Wolf Moon.”

“I’d love to check that out,” she said. “What’s it about?”

“Werewolves.”

“Ooh… I think werewolves are sexy.”

“Hey,” I said, glancing off in the direction of the cafeteria. “If you don’t have anything better to do, what do you say we grab a cup of coffee or something?”

“Are you buying?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“Then I say that’s the best idea I’ve heard all day, Andy.”

I took her books, helped her to her feet.

And so it began.

***

We started dating pretty hot and heavy not long after that. For our first date, we caught a Saturday matinee of some cheesy monster flick I have long since forgotten. Later that same weekend, we rented Misery at the local video store, watched it while we snuggled up together on my parents’ sofa with a massive bowl of popcorn between us.

Throughout our burgeoning courtship I attended the classes in which I had enrolled, but sporadically. The majority of my time I devoted to my new girlfriend, much to Mom and Dad’s chagrin.

I should have known something was rotten in Denmark when I never saw Bridget on campus. On that first day we met, she had explained over her cup of coffee how she had also enrolled in some classes a few minutes before we crossed paths, but then in the weeks to come she claimed to have dropped most of them right after they began. Likewise, I should have known something smelled fishy when she made lame excuses any time I asked to meet her parents.

God, I was such a fool. I should have known nothing could be so perfect.

I never suspected that our entire relationship was a lie. That Bridget Prescott was a girl my friends and I—in another time, another place—would undoubtedly have labeled JAILBAIT.

***

We had been going out for nearly three months before we decided to take things a step further. With the exception of four or five awkward sessions of over-the-clothes petting in the backseat of my Mustang, we had not yet become intimate. Bridget admitted she was not a virgin, but she didn’t want me to think she was “easy.” Of course, I respected my girlfriend’s wish not to cross that line until the time was right. I assured her I would wait forever if that was what she wanted.

But I didn’t have to wait forever.

On the night of February 14, —, Valentine’s Day, Bridget claimed she was ready to give herself to me.

Her parents were supposed to be out of town for the next few days. She promised me in the days leading up to that fateful night that she would do things to me I had never before experienced. Something about a house full of candles, whipped cream and bubble baths and satin sheets and maybe even two sugar-cubes of liquid LSD if everything worked out as planned…

When all was said and done, she did get one thing right.

It turned out to be a night I would never forget.

***

For hours we explored each other’s bodies on her massive, canopied bed, like the last two lovers on a dying Earth with only that final evening left to spend together. I remember her CD changer was stocked with nothing but my favorite blues albums programmed for random play, as Bridget took me to heights of pleasure to which no other woman had ever taken me, before or since.

She had just climbed on top of me, and we were minutes away from climaxing together for the third time that night, when her father busted in on us.

No doubt, my mortified expression—my jaw dropping, my eyes growing wide as dinner plates as I gawked up from beneath my lover at the enormous figure suddenly filling the doorway—must have been one of the most comical sights in all recorded history. If it had happened to some other unfortunate bastard. Not me.

“What the fuck is going on here?” Bridget’s father bellowed, and his deep voice seemed to shake not only our candle-lit sanctum but the Prescotts’ entire two-story house as well.

“Oh,” was all I could say at first. “Oh… uhhh…”

Bridget wept as she rolled off of me, covered herself. “Daddy. I’m so embarrassed.”

“You’re a dead man,” Mr. Prescott promised me, as he stormed into the room.

And I believed him.

***

Before the night was over, Eldon Prescott put me in the hospital. But he didn’t do it alone. He used a baseball bat, and enlisted two of Bridget’s older brothers to help him with the job.

When they were finished, they were courteous enough to call an ambulance for me. The two younger Prescott gentlemen hauled my broken body out onto the cold, dewy lawn for early-morning curbside service.

All told, I suffered a concussion, a broken nose, a fractured wrist, and two broken ribs. Not to mention innumerable bruises and lacerations.

Further adding insult to injury—in the truest sense of that cliché—I limped through the doors of Jackson County Memorial four days later to be confronted by a stern-faced police officer who glared at me as if I were the most disgusting piece of shit he had ever seen. When my father hurried off to the parking lot under the guise of pulling his station wagon around to the front of the hospital (later I realized Dad knew what was about to happen, and wished to spare me the humiliation of it happening in front of him), the cop ushered me into the back of his own vehicle instead, informing me that I was under arrest for statutory rape.

After everything that had happened, he was the first person to tell me why. He enlightened me to the fact that the girl of my dreams, Bridget Prescott, had only recently turned sixteen. I was four years her senior, and thus I had committed a felony sex crime in the state of Tennessee.

In the eyes of the law, I was no better than a child molester. A pedophile. No gray area existed where the legal system was concerned.

I saw Bridget one last time after that. Two weeks after my arrest, she stopped by my house. My mother reluctantly allowed her to enter our home only because she pleaded with Mom to let her apologize. She stayed for about ten minutes. The whole time she cried and cried, and she kept looking over her shoulder as if in fear that her father might show up any second to give me another taste of redneck justice. She explained through her tears that she had only lied to me about her age because I seemed like such an “honest, sincere” man, so much more mature than all the “silly little boys” who normally hit on her every day; I didn’t bother reminding her that this was probably because I was a man, and they were only boys. She did it because she believed in love at first sight, she said, and she was so sure she felt it when I had spoken to her over her battered copy of ’Salem’s Lot on the college campus that day. As for the reason she had been there to begin with, she explained that she had been waiting for her cousin to get out of class. She was a student at the high school just down the block, and her cousin had been her ride home after she missed the bus.

“I’m so sorry, Andy,” she sobbed. “This is all my fault. All I ask is… please don’t hate me.”

I didn’t let her know whether I hated her or not. God knows I wanted to. I wanted to loathe the ground she walked on.

But that’s what made it all the more difficult. I didn’t hate her. Quite the opposite, in fact.

“I’m sorry,” she said again, as she turned to leave at last.

“So am I,” I replied. It was the first time I had spoken since she stepped into my room. “I’m sorry I trusted you. I’m sorry your father and your two macho asshole brothers beat the living shit out of me.”

“Andy—”

“And I’m sorry I have to appear in court over something I never knew I was doing wrong. I’m sorry that, because you lied to me, Bridget, I have to stand in front of a judge and know everyone in that room is looking at me like I’m some kind of pervert. I’m sorry this is gonna be on my permanent record. You’re sorry? Yeah, well… I’m sorry too.”

***

The court date was two months later.

I pled guilty.

When it was all over, I was fined one thousand dollars, sentenced to a year’s probation, and I was ordered to stay away from Bridget Prescott.

It could have been much worse, the judge told me. But since I cooperated every step of the way, admitting what I had done, and considering my record had been spotless up till that point, he was as lenient upon me as the law allowed. Plus, I think the D.A. actually felt a tad sorry for me, after word got around that I had already received my comeuppance from the men in Bridget’s family.

***

I had served my probation, paid my fine. My wounds healed, eventually, along with my ego.

I never saw Bridget Prescott again.

A year or so after our ill-fated evening together, someone told me she ran off to Florida with a guy in his early thirties, but I never knew if that was true or not.

***

Now, almost twenty years later, I had all but forgotten about the mistake I had made when I was a young man. I could not recall the last time I had thought about Bridget Prescott.

But the media forced me to remember. They suddenly began to dredge it all up again, after I discovered Rebecca Lanning’s body.

They almost seemed to enjoy it… to thrive upon it…

I could not run from my past even if I tried, I soon discovered.

The good people of Poinsettia Lane would not let me.

CHAPTER TEN

From Saturday’s edition of the Harris City Tribune, Page 1:

POLICE SEARCH FOR KILLER “AROUND THE CLOCK”

Harris City Police continue to search for the murderer of nine-year-old Rebecca Faye Lanning, whose body was found on Poinsettia Lane two days ago.

According to police spokesperson Jo Lynn Hodges, State Medical Examiner Liam Futch is expected to conduct a post-mortem examination this weekend. Meanwhile, further circumstances surrounding the child’s death cannot be made public at this time, said Hodges.

Rebecca Lanning’s nude body was discovered by local writer Andrew Holland Thursday morning.

Holland, a resident of Harrison County, is the popular horror novelist who penned such provocative titles as Blood Dance, Brain Fever, Cannibal High, and Mortuary Smile. His most recent novel, Slow Burn—a gory tale about a serial killer priest who burns pregnant women alive because he believes they are possessed by demons—debuted last year at #7 on the New York Times Bestseller List.

Police records in his hometown of Jackson, Tennessee show that Andrew Holland was arrested for statutory rape in —, at the age of twenty. After pleading guilty to the charges against him, he was sentenced to one year’s probation.

The writer could not be reached for comment.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Sunday evening, after I had knocked out three or four thousand (very unpolished) words on A Feast of Souls, I went to lock up for the night. Normally I didn’t hit the sack until several hours later, but I figured a good night’s sleep would help recharge my batteries after everything that had happened, and with a little luck a marathon writing session might ensue in the days to come.

I hoped so, anyway. Time was running out.

As I moved through the foyer, approaching my screen door, I smelled the distant aroma of someone grilling hot dogs down the street. My mouth watered. Maybe I should do that for Sam when she comes over next Wednesday, I thought, fix burgers and dogs in the backyard. Yeah. It would be fun. She always did love a good cookout. Norman would undoubtedly enjoy it, too…

I had almost closed the front door, with my hand on the deadbolt, when something outside caught my eye.

Frowning, I eased open the door again, and peered out into the gathering dusk.

To my right, cattycorner across the street from me at 214 Poinsettia Lane, sat Floyd and Francine Beecham’s three-story Cape Cod. The house was dark, but beyond their teal Lincoln Town Car and the enormous Winnebago in their driveway I spotted the Beechams sitting on their front porch, chatting with another couple in the blue-gray twilight.

Muffled laughter. The faint hiss-pop of someone opening a can of soda or beer. A cough.

The way voices carry long distances in that calm period just before nightfall, it only took me a few seconds to recognize the other couple on the Beechams’ porch as the Pastoreks, from three houses down.

A metallic click. Ned Pastorek smoked a pipe now and then, and in the growing darkness I watched him light it. The thick black shadows on the porch briefly recoiled from the flickering orange glow of his Zippo. A minute or two later the sweet smell of tobacco wafted its way across the street to fill my nostrils.

A chill shot up my spine.

In that momentary flash of firelight, I could tell…

They were all looking my way.

They were talking about me.

I cursed myself for being paranoid. Or, at best, for being silly. Surely the two couples were just watching the last rays of the day’s setting sun disappearing on the horizon, through the gap between my property and the Sommersvilles’ next door. A temporary lull in their chitchat had occurred at the precise moment they gazed in my general direction. But it was nothing more sinister than that. Why would it be? This wasn’t a scene from one of my novels. These were people I saw every day. They weren’t body snatchers, aliens from outer space who had recently begun to show their true colors. No scheming quartet of serial killers lurked on the other side of the street. Ridiculous. My horror writer’s imagination had gotten the best of me. I might not have been particularly close to the Beechams or the Pastoreks, but to date I had not met anyone on Poinsettia Lane whom I could claim to truly dislike. And I certainly had no reason to fear them.

The longer I stood there, however… the more I heard… I wondered if all of that was about to change.

It had not been my imagination.

My neighbors were talking about me.

Floyd Beecham scowled and shook his head as he glared my way, his bony tax-collector hands balled into tight white fists. I heard him say something about “raped a little girl” and “Ben Souther told me, and he’s got no reason to lie.”

From behind a cloud of thick blue smoke Ned Pastorek nodded emphatically, said, “One hell of a coincidence, if you get my drift.”

“When you rot your brain with that kinda crap, what do you expect?” said Francine Beecham. She was leaned back in her chair, the silver cane from her recent hip surgery lain crosswise on her considerable lap.

My ears burned like they used to when I was a kid and I’d been caught doing something naughty. I swallowed nervously and thinned the gap in my doorway, straining to hear more of the conversation across the street.

The wind chimes on my front porch tingled and pinged in the evening breeze, as if threatening to betray me.

“I mean, I’m all for freedom of speech,” said Ned Pastorek. “But there’s gotta be a limit, ya know?”

“You got that right,” Floyd Beecham agreed.

“If not, then look what happens.”

“Just goes to show,” said Floyd’s wife, “you think you know someone, but you never really do.”

Mitzi Pastorek took a sip from a gold can on the porch railing beside her, pondered with a melodramatic shudder, “I wonder what he’s doing in there right now…”

I thinned the gap in my doorway some more. Winced when the door’s hinges squeaked.

A car sped by my house just then. It was Trey Glover’s new Mustang, a sleek black beast vibrating with the basso thump of rap music. For several seconds it drowned out the conversation across the street.

Back before everything went to shit, I remembered, the Beechams used to have a reputation for raising a stink about such things. Francine had even written a letter to the Tribune earlier this year complaining about the “disrespectful youth of today thinking everyone and his brother wants to hear their sordid ‘jungle music’ ” As the rumbling Mustang passed between us now, though, as I watched them across the street, none of the people on the Beechams’ porch said anything. They just watched the Glover boy go by. Francine even threw up a meaty hand in friendly greeting.

They had other things to complain about now.

When the Mustang had passed, and the street was quiet again, my eyes grew wide. I watched Floyd Beecham stand to retrieve something from one corner of his porch. The way his skinny silhouette lurched and stumbled about, I could tell he had been drinking. A lot.

“I’ll give him some of this, by God,” he announced.

It was a gun. His hunting rifle. The same one, I was sure, that he had shown Ben Souther and me just several weeks ago, bragging about it as if it were the greatest specimen ever constructed by human hands.

He pointed it my way. Sighted down the barrel.

I didn’t move. I didn’t breathe.

“Kapow!” Mitzi Pastorek giggled. “That’d do the trick.”

Floyd belched, put the gun down, and fell back into his seat. “Goddamn right. Take care of things real nice, wouldn’t it?”

I was about to turn away then, when someone else came out of the Beechams’ house. Someone I had always thought looked just like Pete Rose. The screen door slammed shut behind him. He held three bottles of beer, which he passed out to the other men on the porch, keeping one for himself.

“Now, Floyd, old buddy,” he said, “I’ll pretend I didn’t see that.”

They all laughed.

Before he plopped down on the railing beside Mitzi Pastorek, the big cop took a second to open a new pack of cigarettes pulled from the breast pocket of his uniform. He winked at his friends in the glow of Ned Pastorek’s proffered Zippo and said, “Though I gotta admit, it’d probably make our jobs a helluva lot easier.”

More cruel laughter at my expense.

I stumbled back from the door, shaking my head in disbelief.

What the hell was going on around here?

“Where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire,” said Ned Pastorek. “That’s all I’m saying.”

I did not want to hear any more. With trembling hands, I closed the door. Locked it.

I felt so confused. Alone.

And more than a little afraid.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Wednesday afternoon. Six days had passed since Rebecca Lanning’s murder.

I would never forget what I had seen. I knew the sight of that little girl lying there in the dirt, like so much garbage, would haunt me for the rest of my life.

Then there was the matter of my neighbors…

But I would worry about that later, I decided. Today I felt alive, reinvigorated. My daughter had come to visit, and in Samantha’s company my troubles of the last weeks seemed like nothing worse than foggy memories. Worries from another time, another place.

At least for a little while.

“Tag, Norman… you’re It!” The eleven-year-old giggled as Norman chased her around the backyard and a cool summer breeze engulfed us all. “Look, Dad! Daddy, look! Ha-ha-haaa!”

I turned, watched her fall beneath the golden retriever, and I laughed so hard I nearly doubled over beneath the sharp pains shooting through my ribs. Sam’s long blond hair was tangled and frizzy, her pink T-shirt and white shorts blotchy all over with grass stains from an afternoon of rolling around in the yard with Norman. Karen would undoubtedly read me the riot act for allowing our daughter to ruin her brand new outfit. She had warned me when I picked Sam up that these clothes were for the upcoming school year, so I should make sure she didn’t get a speck of dirt on them. But I hardly cared about the consequences. I would buy some Sam more, gladly. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt so complete. Hearing Norman’s gentle chuffs, the constant jingle of his dog collar, and Samantha’s carefree laughter echoing about my property as I sweated over our dinner of hotdogs and hamburgers on the grill, I could almost imagine everything was okay in my world. I could believe that things were back to normal, and we were a family again. I expected Karen to appear through the back door at any moment, balancing a tray of condiments in one hand, bowls of baked beans and potato salad in the other. I envisioned her wearing that T-shirt with the cover art to my novel Devil Woman silk-screened on the front—the very cover for which she had modeled not long after our fifth anniversary—and those tight black jeans with the sexy little hole in the left ass-cheek. As soon as her hands were free, I fantasized, she would obey the command upon my apron; she would KISS THE COOK, slowly and deeply and passionately, until Sam demanded, “Stop that, you guys! Ewww!”

I remembered what it was like. Before. When everything was perfect and in its rightful place.

And then I quickly banished such thoughts from my brain, lest I ruin my wonderful mood. Samantha was here, she was having the time of her life, and I wanted to cherish every second we spent together before I drove her back to her mother’s place later that evening.

“Get her, Norman! Get her!” I laughed, high and loud.

Overhead, a distant jet carved a long white streak in the sky. A big rig’s air brakes farted and hissed across town. Next door, I could hear Ben Souther watching a Braves game on TV: the sharp crack of a triple-bagger at least, the fervent roar of the crowd, and occasional off-color commentary from my neighbor (“Go, you son of a bitch, go! Oh, that’s pathetic! I’m sixty-three years old and I could play better ball in my sleep!”).

Humming an old Led Zeppelin tune to myself, I wiped a slick sheen of sweat from my brow. I tossed my spatula in the air, caught it. Did it again behind my back, with masterful skill. Unfortunately, no one was watching.

I turned down the gas on the grill then, and flipped the burgers one last time.

A few minutes later I called to Sam over my shoulder, “Okay, hon, you’d better go wash up now. Dinner’s almost ready!”

When she did not reply, I turned toward her, squinting through the smoke and blurry waves of heat billowing up from the grill.

“Short-stuff…?”

My breath caught in my throat. The spatula fell from my hand, into the grass at my feet.

Samantha lay on her back in the middle of the yard, her eyes closed. Her skinny white limbs were splayed out in every direction, with the exception of one pale leg, which was bent beneath her at an uncomfortable-looking angle. She wasn’t moving. Was she even breathing? I couldn’t tell.

Norman stood over her, panting.

“Sam?”

Strobe-flash images of Rebecca Lanning’s spread-eagled corpse filled my head, superimposing themselves over my daughter’s limp form…

“Oh, God… Samantha!”

I started toward her, my heart slamming in my chest like a jackhammer. I had been a bit worried about Sam earlier, as she had complained of a tummy-ache off and on all morning. Every time I asked her to take something for it, though, she had refused, insisting she felt better. Now I cursed myself for not driving her to the Emergency Room right away.

“Sam!”

I felt as if I were moving in slow motion. The distance between us—barely a dozen feet—seemed like a million miles.

But then Norman beamed up at me in that almost-human way dogs appear to smile when they are most content. He barked once, as if to assure me that I had been the butt of a very unfunny joke, before pouncing on Sam. He nuzzled her neck, attacked her chin with his long, pink tongue, and she came alive with a flurry of giggles that allowed my heart rate to return to some semblance of normal.

“Guh-ross, Norman!” she said, wiping her shiny, dog-wet mouth with the back of one hand.

He sniffed her thigh. Licked it twice.

“That tickles, boy!”

She shoved him away, jumped to her feet.

I took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “That wasn’t funny, Sam. That wasn’t funny at all.”

“What’s the matter, Dad? Did I scare you?”

I rolled my eyes, made a farting sound out one side of my mouth. “Of course not.”

“I think I did.”

“Whatever, Miss America. Now go wash up, okay? Dinner will be ready in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

“Okay,” Sam said, brushing grass and Norman-hair from her clothes. “If you say so. But I think I got you that time!”

I gave her a light smack on her bottom, and she took off for the house, giggling all the way.

The back door slammed shut behind her. The sound was like a gunshot ricocheting off the privacy fence surrounding my backyard. Her mother and I used to scold her for that in the past, but today I couldn’t have cared less.

I bent to retrieve my spatula, washed it off with the garden hose coiled a few feet away.

Norman trotted over to watch me work.

I smiled, gave him a scratch behind the ears. “Hungry, boy?”

He barked up at me.

“Me too. I’m famished. But don’t worry. There’s plenty for everyone. Even the four-legged members of the family.”

The retriever made a disinterested snuffling noise and plopped down at the foot of the grill. He rested his head on his paws. His eyes were watery, forlorn.

“You okay, boy?” I asked him.

He barked again, but this time it was a hoarse, half-hearted sound followed by a distressed whimper.
Truth be told, I knew exactly what was bothering Norman. Ever since that fateful Thursday morning, I could tell my dog had not been the same. It wasn’t anything I could put a finger on, really, other than a slight tension in the retriever’s haunches, a cautious twitch of his ears every few minutes. Yet I knew he sensed the wrongness that had festered within our neighborhood these last few days. An ominous feeling lingered on every breeze, like the ozone scent of a storm looming just seconds away. The air around us crackled with a strange, electric quiet. Gone were the low, rattling drone of skateboard wheels atop asphalt and the ticking of playing cards in bicycle spokes and the carefree laughter of children which normally echoed up and down our block… as if the paranoid parents of Poinsettia Lane had forbidden their offspring from venturing outside ever again. Yes, Norman felt it too. We were both haunted. I could see it in the way the retriever did not wag his tail, but kept it tucked between his legs the second my daughter was out of sight, as if he knew he did not deserve to be happy after witnessing the atrocities which had occurred just two hundred yards from where he buried his bones, growled at squirrels, and laid his furry head at night to dream his canine dreams.

He kept up the pretense around Sam. I had to give him that. But he couldn’t fool me.

“It’s okay, Norman,” I said. “Let’s try to forget about it. Let’s enjoy our time with Sam, and pig out tonight. What do you say?”

He gazed up at me, made another pitiful whining noise in the back of his throat. His tail twitched once, like a dying fish.

I squatted down beside him, stroked his golden head. “Everything is gonna be okay, boy. I promise.”

But even as I said it, I wondered if I truly believed it.

I stood then, proceeded to transfer the burgers and dogs from the grill to a plate. I covered the plate with a paper towel, slid it onto an old aluminum card table I had dragged outside for our meal. The aroma was nearly breathtaking.

Once my work was finished, I glanced toward the house. “What in the world is taking Sam so long?”

Norman’s head craned in that direction, as if he had begun to wonder the same thing.

“Sam?” I called for her. “I’m gonna eat it all if you don’t get out here!”

I watched the door, waiting for her to burst through with proclamations of “I don’t think so, Dad!” and “Not on your life!”

But she didn’t. The door remained shut. The house was silent, still.

Somewhere down the street, a car backfired. A strong breeze whispered through the trees beyond my privacy fence. A dog barked a few yards over, but Norman’s ears did not perk up.

“Sam? Honey?”

At last, the door creaked open.

My little girl stepped out.

“Come on, slowpoke,” I said. “Our dinner is gonna get cold.”

“Daddy?” A sniffle. “What’s… what’s wrong with me?”

She held her left hand open, palm-up, in front of her. She just stood there, staring at it. A single tear trickled down her cheek. Her face was pale, shiny with perspiration.

“Sam? Are you okay?”

“What’s wrong with me?” she asked again, her bottom lip quivering.

She staggered across the lawn toward me, her teary gaze never leaving her left hand.

I met her halfway.

“Baby, what is it? What’s the matter?”

The tips of my daughter’s index and middle fingers were smeared with dark brownish blood.

“I’m scared,” she said. “D-Daddy, what’s happening?”

“Jesus,” I whispered, throwing my arms around her. My heart leapt into my throat. I glanced toward the house, and for those first few seconds I wondered if someone lurked inside my home. Perhaps the same person who had hurt Rebecca Lanning…

“Oh my God, Samantha, what—”

And then, suddenly, it hit me.

I felt like such an idiot.

Between her legs, Sam’s white shorts were also speckled with several dime-sized dots of dark blood. Not much, but enough to make me realize what had happened here. What was “wrong” with her.

“Oh, baby…”

“Daddy?” she said. “Am I dying?”

In spite of the situation, a nervous chuckle slipped out of me. I couldn’t help it. Because my fear was instantly replaced with an almost dizzying sense of relief.

“No, sweetheart,” I said. “Not at all. You’re not dying.”

“Really?” she wept.

“Would I lie to you?”

I kissed her forehead, brushed her long blond hair out of her eyes.

“Daddy… ”

She buried her face in my chest, and her body hitched with sobs. I could feel the sticky discharge on her fingers staining my shirt collar, smearing across the nape of my neck.

“It’s okay,” I told her. “Shh. Sam, it’s okay…”

As I held her, I clenched my fists behind her back. I couldn’t believe her mother hadn’t told her. Damn you, Karen, I thought. My ex-wife had been so busy carrying on her torrid affair with Captain Studmuffin, she hadn’t bothered explaining to Sam that something like this might happen soon. Would happen soon. That our little girl’s body was changing day by day, and it would only be a matter of time before she was no longer a little girl.

Now the task had been left up to me.

I wished Karen were standing right there in front of me so I could give her a piece of my mind.

My cheeks grew hot. I had never felt so awkward in my life. But I knew what had to be done.

First things first, I turned to Norman.

“Stay,” I told him, in the most no-nonsense voice I could muster. I pointed at the food on the table. “Don’t you even think about it, furball. I mean it.”

The retriever whined up at me as if I had deeply offended him. Come on, Andy, his big watery eyes seemed to say. Give me the benefit of the doubt, would ya?

I picked Samantha up, and carried her into the house like I used to when she was an infant.

“Everything is going to be fine, honey,” I said, easing her down onto her feet in the hallway outside the bathroom door. “I want you to take a warm washcloth and get yourself cleaned up. While you do that, I’ll grab some clean clothes out of your bedroom. Then we’re gonna take a little trip to the store.”

“The store?” Sam said. “But what about dinner?”

“We’ll worry about dinner later. I’ll bring the food inside. We’ll heat it up and eat when we get back. For now we need to… we should probably pick up a few… things… at the Stop-N-Shop.”

“What kinds of things?”

Your guess is as good as mine, I thought. Is there a number a guy can call for such a dilemma? Some sort of website?

But to Sam I said, “Just get yourself washed up, okay? Hurry. We’ll talk about it on the way.”

“Okay, Daddy.”

I motioned her into the bathroom. Closed the door behind me. Slid down the wall, and held my head in my hands. I tried not to hate my ex-wife. Tried to convince myself that she had merely waited too long to have this discussion with Sam, but she hadn’t planned to put it off forever. Perhaps she had been searching for the right words to say and hadn’t found them yet. I hoped that was the case. Prayed that was her excuse. Because I could certainly relate…

“How the hell am I supposed to handle this?” I groaned. “I don’t have ovaries, for Christ’s sake.”

For those next few minutes, as I listened to the sound of running water in the bathroom and the muffled flush of the toilet, I found myself wondering who my daughter would be when she grew older. Where would she go in life, after she stopped needing me? What amazing feats might she accomplish? Who would capture her heart one day, when she became a woman?

I would know soon enough. The events of this afternoon had forced me to accept that fact, whether I wanted to or not.

My God, where did the years go?

And why, at a time like this, did I suddenly find myself thinking—out of all the people in the world—of Eldon Prescott, my jailbait girlfriend’s father from so many years ago? Why did I, for the first time ever, realize that I sympathized one hundred percent with the big man’s fury on that fateful night?

I did not understand why he suddenly filled my thoughts. Then again, as I sat there brooding over how to explain to my daughter what was happening to her body… it all made perfect sense. Somehow. In some strange way.

Finally, Sam came out of the bathroom wrapped in a pink Bugs Bunny beach towel. I exhaled loudly when the door opened, remembered to start breathing again.

“Daddy?” she said, peering down at me. “I thought you were gonna get me some clean clothes.”
I stood, composed myself.

“Um, yeah,” I said. “Yeah. Sorry…”

I hurried down the hallway to her bedroom, wiping my eyes as I went.

She followed me.

“Are you all right, Dad?”

“I’m all right.”

“You looked like you were getting ready to cry.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “I just had something in my eye.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“Do you want to go in with me?” I asked her as I parked the Explorer in front of the 7th Avenue Stop-N-Shop.

Locks of my daughter’s sweaty blond hair danced within the air-conditioner’s breeze as she reached to turn it down. Before we left the house, she had slipped into her favorite pajamas. She looked comfortable now, no longer scared, but very tired. And disappointed, somehow. As if she had barely survived some tragic ordeal far worse than her first menstruation, and she knew it had changed her forever.

“I think I’ll wait in the car,” she said. “If that’s okay?”

“Of course it’s okay.”

She gave me a sad little smile, started fiddling with the radio.

“Sit tight, sweetheart. I’ll be right back.”

I sat there watching her until she found something she liked, and then I slowly climbed out of the Explorer.

I felt so old. Useless.

***

An electronic bell above the door chimed twice as I entered the building.

“’Afternoon,” said the guy behind the counter, but he did not turn from his work as he said it. He was busy stocking a tall plastic shelf with cartons of Camel cigarettes, giving every customer who entered the store a free view of his enormous ass-crack each time he bent over to open a new box.

“What’s up, Round Man,” I mumbled a dutiful reply.

I headed for the toiletries aisle. My shoes squeaked like dying mice on the store’s recently-buffed tile floor.

When I reached my destination, I gave an exasperated sigh. I hadn’t expected this to be a simple task by any means, but as I stood there staring at the myriad of choices before me, scratching my head like a chimpanzee trying to comprehend the fundamentals of long division, I felt as if I were drowning in a sea of feminine hygiene products.

Thin… ultra-thin… ultra-thin with wings… super absorbency… regular absorbency… “light days”… “overnighters”…

Christ. What the hell was I supposed to buy for an eleven-year-old? It gave me a headache, trying to sort it all out.

After what felt like forever, I returned to the front of the store, placing a small blue box of maxi-pads on the counter beside the cash register.

Ronnie “Round Man” Miller, owner of the 7th Avenue Stop-N-Shop, continued his work at the cigarette racks.

I coughed into my fist to get his attention.

“Oh, sorry about that—”

His eyes grew wide when he turned around. His Adam’s apple jiggled and twitched like some living thing stuck in his throat, trying to get out. He looked like an enormous deer caught in a hunter’s spotlight.

“Um… h-hey there, Mr. Holland,” he stammered.

Ronnie “Round Man” Miller had called me “Mr. Holland” from the first day we met, even though I was seven or eight years his junior and had reminded him countless times that my first name would suffice. He was a very obese fellow, the type of person I would have described as “pear-shaped” in one of my novels. He kept his hair shaved in a Marine-style buzz-cut, but a bushy salt-and-pepper goatee dangled at least three inches from his chin (in certain company he called it his “pussy tickler,” which never failed to make me chuckle despite the crudity of such a claim). He favored loud Hawaiian shirts and leather sandals, wore three silver hoops in his left ear. His breath always smelled suspiciously like the butterscotch candies he kept in the GIVE A NICKEL/SEND A BLIND KID TO BAND CAMP bowl beside his cash register.

I liked Round Man a lot. I always had. He was a genuinely nice guy, an amicable sort with whom you could strike up a conversation about anything at any time and never find yourself growing bored. His perpetually meek demeanor never failed to belie his hulking, middle-aged-punk appearance.

On the day in question, however, I knew—the second he saw me standing there—that something was wrong.

“Hey, Round Man,” I said. “How’s business?”

His mouth worked soundlessly for several seconds as he tried his damnedest not to look me in the eyes. He stared down at the box of maxi-pads on the counter between us, shifted his considerable weight from one foot to the other. Behind him, on a battered old ghetto blaster with a peace symbol sticker over one speaker, Jimmy Buffet sang about growing older but not up.

Round Man reached to turn down the radio.

“I, um… heh… I woulda figured this was the kinda thing you didn’t have to worry about anymore, Mr. Holland,” he said, offering me a lop-sided smile.

“Come again?” I said.

“Being… ya know, divorced and all. I assumed trips to the store to pick up, uh, stuff like this for the, um, little lady was a thing of the past for ya.”

“Right,” I said.

He glanced outside, through the Stop-N-Shop’s plate glass window. When he saw Samantha sitting in the passenger seat of the Explorer, his fat face turned as red as the Marlboro sign on the wall behind him.

“Oh,” he said. He looked sick.

“Don’t worry about it,” I told him. “I don’t mean to be rude, Round Man, but I’m sorta in a hurry, okay?”

“Sure, sure. Sorry. Sorry.” Round Man’s head bobbed up and down as his chubby fingers rang up my purchase.

It took him several tries to get it right. His hands were shaking.

I crossed my arms. Glanced around the store, waiting.

And I froze… when I spotted something that made my heart start to beat a little bit faster.

For as long as I had lived on Poinsettia Lane less than a mile from his store, Round Man kept two crooked aluminum racks propped up on the counter to the right of the cash register. Normally, those racks were stocked with several dozen copies of my latest novels, mass-market paperback editions the Stop-N-Shop’s rotund proprietor purchased from the distributor at bulk wholesale prices. SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR, read a bright yellow decal on every cover, above a penciled-in price at least twice that edition’s original value. The green placard at the top of the rack, its bottom edge carefully trimmed to look like dripping slime, advertised SPOOOOOKY BOOKS BY A LOCAL FAVE!!!!!, and every “O” resembled a bulging, bloodshot monster eye drawn in red Magic Marker.

Today, though, that sign was nowhere to be seen.

The racks were bare. My books were gone. Every last one of them.

A chill caressed my spine at the sight of those empty, skeletal racks.

There had to be a reasonable explanation, I told myself. Maybe every copy had sold out since my last visit, and Round Man was simply awaiting another shipment. Perhaps some horror-loving thief with impeccable taste had absconded with my portly pal’s entire inventory. Or… another unsettling possibility lurked in the back of my brain as well.

“That’ll be, um, $6.99, Mr. Holland,” said Round Man. “Please.”

I handed him a twenty-dollar bill. “So what happened to all my books, Round Man? Some dealer buy you out?”

He licked his lips. Scratched at an itchy spot behind his left ear. Watched a squat brown Toyota pull up at the gas pumps outside, and flinched at the resulting ding-ding as if he had never heard it before.

In a voice so low I could barely hear him, he said to me, “It’s nothin’ personal, Mr. Holland. Swear to God.”

“I don’t understand.”

Round Man’s face looked like that of a man in great agony as he set my change down on the counter. He scooted it toward me, along with my box of maxi-pads and my receipt. As if he were afraid to touch me, lest he contract some deadly disease.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

I stepped back from the counter. Felt cold all over.

“You gotta be kidding me,” I said. “Not you too.”

He fondled his monstrous goatee as if he wished he could crawl up inside of it and hide.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled again.

I shoved my change into my pocket. “This is unbelievable.”

He did not attempt to explain until I turned to leave.

“I got a business to run, Mr. Holland,” he said when I was halfway to the door. “People know me. People like me. I got loyal customers, folks who come to the Stop-N-Shop to get what they need even though that new 7-Eleven down the block might be a few bucks cheaper. I can’t let nothin’ jeopardize that, man. I got a family to feed, two mortgages on my house.”

I didn’t know what to say. I just stood there in front of the exit, my back to him. I could feel my blood pressure rising.

“It’s nothin’ personal,” he assured me again. “It’s just—”

“It’s just what, Round Man?” I said.

“The things they’re saying on the news. About you. People are talking, Mr. Holland. I don’t believe a word of it, of course, but—”

He glanced down at his sandals, then back up at me.

“They turn on you,” Round Man whispered, “if you go against the flow.”

“They turn on you,” I said, slowly nodding.

“Yeah.”

“Fucking tell me about it.”

I glared at Round Man. The silence between us seemed to swirl about the store like something tangible. Something living, dark, and hungry leeching away at the friendship we once shared.

He stared at the Slush Puppy machine along the Stop-N-Shop’s east wall. Toward the potato chip aisle behind me, and the beer coolers in the back. Anywhere but in my furious gaze.

He shifted his weight yet again from one foot to the other, and pointed toward something off to my left.

“You, uh… you wanna buy a ribbon, Mr. Holland?” he asked me.

For the first time, I noticed the cardboard display at the far end of the counter. IN MEMORY OF REBECCA LANNING, read the cursive Magic Marker logo at the top of this rack, above a collection of pink ribbons designed to be worn on collars and lapels, $1.99 OR 3 FOR $5.00.

“I was just thinking it might help matters,” Round Man babbled. “I mean… ya know… if you were, um, seen wearin’ one around town.”

“Jesus,” I hissed under my breath.

“Of course, it’s free for you,” he quickly added. “I wouldn’t think of charging my favorite writer, no way!”

A hoarse laugh slipped out of me against my will.

“Take one,” Round Man said. “Please? On the house. Here. Maybe your daughter would like one too?”

I could look at him no more. I had to get the hell out of there now.

Trembling with rage, I forced open the Stop-N-Shop’s front door with the palm of one hand. Hard.

“God damn you,” I fumed, as I stormed back to my Explorer.

At the gas pumps, an ancient black man in a LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT JESUS T-shirt paused in filling up his Toyota.

I ignored his disapproving glare.

“God damn every one of you two-faced motherfuckers.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

From Thursday’s edition of the Harris City Tribune, Page 1:

SEARCH FOR CHILD’S KILLER CONTINUES

ONE WEEK LATER, POLICE HAVE NO LEADS IN SHOCKING SEX CRIME

Harris City Police report no new findings in their search for the murderer of nine-year-old Rebecca Faye Lanning, whose body was found on Poinsettia Lane one week ago.

Rebecca Lanning’s nude body was discovered by local writer Andrew Holland last Thursday morning. Holland, a resident of Harrison County, is the popular horror novelist who penned such provocative titles as Blood Dance, Brain Fever, Cannibal High, and Mortuary Smile.

“The citizens of our fair city can rest assured that we are working around the clock to apprehend Rebecca Lanning’s murderer as soon as possible,” said Detective Paul Hembry, who is in charge of the investigation. “Meanwhile, here is a case of one man simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time… no connection between Mr. Holland’s livelihood (and) this terrible crime is suspected, nor should one be implied.”

Andrew Holland’s most recent novel, Slow Burn—a gory thriller about a serial murderer who burns pregnant women alive because he believes they are possessed by demons—debuted last year at #7 on the New York Times Bestseller List.

According to police records in his hometown of Jackson, Tennessee, Holland was sentenced to one year’s probation in April of ——, after pleading guilty to statutory rape.

The writer was unavailable for comment.

The Harris City Police Department urges anyone with information pertaining to the Rebecca Lanning case to call 704-555-4911 immediately.

I have never made a habit of reading or watching the news regularly. I always found it all too depressing, and needless to say that opinion multiplied tenfold after a child was murdered in my neighborhood. But at least once a week I did log on to the Tribune’s website, skimming the day’s top stories if only to procrastinate for a few minutes before getting started on my latest project.

On the morning in question, I slammed a fist down on my desk, narrowly missing my keyboard.

“Hot damn!”

It was not an exclamation of anger. A grin stretched across my face as I re-read that article on my computer screen a second time. A third. For now I barely even noticed the reporter’s enthusiastic mention of my chosen genre, or my indiscretion of twenty years ago. I had learned to expect as much, hated the media for what they were trying to do, but the only thing I could focus on for the next few minutes was that paragraph quoting Detective Paul Hembry. I almost wanted to hug him. God bless the chubby son of a bitch!

No connection between Mr. Holland’s livelihood and this terrible crime is suspected, nor should one be implied…

“It’s about freakin’ time!” I declared to my empty house. And again: “Hot damn!”

Instantly, a ten-ton weight seemed to lift off of me. I felt an odd sense of victory. Like a man who has beaten unbelievable odds, and can barely refrain from rubbing it in his detractors’ smug faces one by one.

For a minute or two, before I logged off the Internet and began my work for the day, I considered buying hundreds of copies of that morning’s paper, pasting the front page all over Poinsettia Lane so my self-righteous, shithead neighbors could see the error of their ways. Perhaps I would start near town, at Round Man’s 7th Avenue Stop-N-Shop, and work my way backwards. My last stop would be the cul-de-sac at the end of the block, right on the windshield of Keith Whitmire’s patrol car.

It was certainly a tempting thought.

Instead, I used my newfound energy to jump headfirst into my novel, reinvigorated and filled with an inner peace the likes of which I had not felt since long before Norman and I wandered onto the Clinton property at the end of the block.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The next few days passed uneventfully.

I stayed inside, venturing out of my house only to feed Norman, check the mail, and to pick up Sam for our weekend together. Once I thought about mowing the lawn, but decided against it when I spotted Floyd Beecham puttering about with a weed-eater in his own yard across the street. While the article in Thursday’s Tribune confirmed I had nothing to worry about in regards to being blamed for Rebecca Lanning’s death—and I was sure my neighbors must have conceded to the truth as well by now, after reading that quote directly from Detective Hembry—I hoped if I just laid low for a day or two, everything would blow over once and for all. Once my time with Sam was over, I immersed myself in my work as best I could, and before long I began to float on that creative high which often results from periods of increased productivity. Despite everything that had recently transpired, the constrained edginess that tingled within my bones like some supernatural presentiment of horrors yet to come soon dissipated into nothing more than an anxious desire to convince myself that things couldn’t possibly be as bad as they seemed. I had gotten it all wrong, misunderstood their intentions. I felt shunned by my neighbors, yes… but surely they meant me no harm. They were victims too, victims of their own paranoia in the wake of an unthinkable crime which had affected us all. The people of Poinsettia Lane only wanted to protect their children. I could not fault them for that. We were all afraid. Trust was a scarce commodity these days, and until the police caught the pervert who had raped and murdered Rebecca Lanning, any one of us could be her killer.

Our lives would return to normal. Friendships would be mended, apologies made. Once that little girl’s murderer was rotting behind bars where he belonged, we would persevere. Together. We would rebuild everything we had lost.

Eventually, this storm would pass…

Or so I thought. I pretended to believe as much.

Until the following Monday morning, when I awoke to find something in my driveway which made me realize my nightmare was just beginning.

***

I rose from bed several hours later than usual, after toiling on A Feast of Souls till well past three a.m. the night before. First things first, I started a pot of Starbucks Breakfast Blend in the kitchen. I turned on the radio atop the refrigerator. As the coffeemaker gurgled and hissed and two obnoxious WKRZ morning show deejays tried too hard to be hilarious in a skit about Richard Simmons being abducted by aliens, I tore open a box of strawberry Pop-Tarts and slid one into the toaster.

While the coffee brewed, I padded to the front door in my pajamas and a pair of old flip-flops.

Dust motes danced in the bright shaft of sunlight bleeding through my living room window. From somewhere down the street came the loud beep-beep-beep of a reversing garbage truck. A melodious duet between two flirting sparrows. A few seconds later, the shrill whine of an electric saw drowned out everything else—Freddy Morgan and Lorne Childress beginning their day’s work on Morgan’s new deck.

The smell of percolating java filled my house. I yawned, stretched. My bones creaked and popped, reminding me that I wasn’t getting any younger.

I opened the door, stepped out onto my porch into the path of a morning breeze.

And instantly my pulse quickened.

At the end of my driveway, half on the street and half on the curb bordering my property, my garbage can lay on its side like the fat green carcass of some plastic beast that had sprawled there to die overnight. Its lid sat a few feet away, wrenched from its hinges.

The can’s contents had been strewn everywhere.

I frowned. Swallowed nervously. Winced at the taste of my own sour morning breath. A low droning noise, like the ominous rumble of approaching nuclear warheads, filled my brain as I tried to comprehend exactly what had happened here…

A pesky stray dog had gotten into my trash. Perhaps a reckless driver had swerved off the road in the middle of the night, committing a troublesome but otherwise harmless act of hit-and-run upon my garbage can. That was all.

I wanted to believe as much, tried like hell to force myself into accepting one of those scenarios, but after another minute or two of standing there staring at the pandemonium in my front yard, I knew I was wrong.

There was something too meticulous about this mess. A methodical sort of pattern, almost, to the rainbow of refuse cluttering the far corner of my property. None of my eviscerated garbage can’s guts littered the street. Or the Sommersvilles’ yard adjacent to mine. The Hefty bags in which I discarded my daily trash had not been ripped open haphazardly; rather, their yellow tie-strings had been carefully unknotted, as if by human hands.

This was not the work of teenaged vandals or starving mutts scrounging for discarded leftovers. Somehow, I could tell…

The cumulus before me bore the appearance of items that had been picked through. Sorted.

As if the culprits were searching for something.

Slowly, I staggered down the steps of my front porch. My heart raced, and my legs felt like they had turned to liquid.

What had they been looking for? I wondered as I approached the mess on my lawn. Who had done this? Why?

In the backyard, Norman barked twice. A lawnmower engine stuttered to life somewhere down the block. An electronic car-lock chirped like an excited bird.

But I barely heard any of it.

Still shaking my head, cursing beneath my breath, I bent to clean up the mess: that filthy agglomeration of used coffee filters, crumpled junk-mail envelopes, flattened soda cans, and stinking, soggy leftovers from a divorced father’s countless lonely dinners.

. . . and then I saw it.

Looming a dozen feet or so from my overturned garbage can, in my peripheral vision: something small, white, moving.

I flinched, turned, and when I finally laid my eyes upon that twitching flash of white, I could not breathe.

“No. You… sick… bastards…”

Hanging from my mailbox, like some demented flag of conquest, were my daughter’s panties.

The panties Sam had been wearing the day she started her first period.

Tiny, snow-white panties stained at the crotch with dried brown blood. Like the grisly evidence of some unimaginable crime.

They fluttered and billowed in the day’s cool breeze. So bright, in contrast to my ash-gray mailbox and the grass beyond it. So pale, untainted. Except where she had become a woman…

From the shadows on my front porch, my wind chimes tingled softly. Taunting me.

My knees buckled. My world seemed to tilt to one side, and I thought I might fall off.

“Jesus…”

What happened next? What ridiculous conclusions would my neighbors come to now, with the discovery of a child’s bloody underwear in my garbage?

I watched, numb, as a fly lit upon my daughter’s panties. A fat bluebottle fly drawn to the scent of her blood. It crawled along their thin elastic band, its metallic green body glistening in the sunlight like a living jewel.

My guts roiled. The air around me tasted thick, bitter.

The fly crawled downward, found what it was looking for.

For another long minute or two, I could not move. I felt paralyzed by the gravity of what this meant, this inexorable portent of troubles yet to come.

It was their message, I knew. A warning from my estranged neighbors. Their delusional way of informing me: WE’RE ON TO YOU, ANDY. YOU MAY HAVE FOOLED THE AUTHORITIES, BUT WE KNOW WHAT YOU ARE…

“You don’t know any fucking thing,” I spat. “Nothing! You miserable sons of bitches…”

I staggered over to the mailbox then, and I ripped Sam’s panties off their perch. I crumpled them into a tight little ball and shoved them into my back pocket with hands that trembled like those of a man suffering from Parkinson’s disease.

I turned, preparing to head back inside.

For the first time I noticed that the clamor of construction on Freddy Morgan’s deck across the street had ceased.

A smothering cloak of silence draped itself over Poinsettia Lane.

I did not turn in their direction, but I could feel them watching me.

All of them.

Suddenly, cleaning up the mess on my front lawn became the very least of my worries. I had to get inside. Now.

Home was a million miles away. My feet weighed a thousand pounds each. I moved in the syrupy, slow-motion gait of a nightmare as I lurched through the yard like Frankenstein’s Monster, desperate to get back inside.

Finally, I reached the steps of my front porch. They seemed to stretch heavenward, at an impossible angle, into infinity. Before I searched for the energy in my legs to climb the steps, however, I glanced back once. I do not know why. I should have known better.

I turned, and my watery gaze fell upon the house directly across the street…

Donna Dunaway stood there, behind her screen door, her face barely visible in the darkness of her foyer. I might not have noticed her at all, if not for the bright yellow maternity gown she wore. Her hands lay atop her pregnant belly, fingers splayed open.

She was staring in my direction, though I could not make out her expression.

I smiled weakly. Mouthed a silent hello. Raised a shaky hand toward the one person I prayed might be my last ally.

Please, Donna, my gesture pleaded with her, assure me that you haven’t turned your back on me too.

PLEASE…

I had always liked Donna Dunaway. She was a very plain lady, the type few men on the street would afford a second glance, but her amiable demeanor made her nothing less than gorgeous to anyone who knew her. It had been such a shock to all of us when her husband, Allen, left her last spring (for one of his Monday night bowling league teammates, if you believed our neighborhood’s most percipient gossipmongers). Perhaps that was another reason I admired her so—Donna seemed determined to make it without the guy even as she waddled through her third trimester amidst the sweltering heat of summer. In a way, after my own spouse decided to leave me for greener pastures, I considered Donna and myself kindred souls.

However, when I waved to her that morning, praying she had not been tainted by the pharisaic hive-mind mentality that had infected every other resident of Poinsettia Lane… Donna Dunaway quickly stepped back out of sight.

I made a stunned grunting noise in the back of my throat as I watched her front door swing shut.

The flowery curtains in her bay window fluttered a few seconds later, as they were drawn together by two pale hands.

I felt cold. So cold.

I leapt up my steps without further hesitation. Tripped and fell twice, scraping flesh from my shins, before I made it inside.

I lost one of my flip-flops on the way, but I left it lying there on the porch. I did not dare go back to retrieve it.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“I need to talk to Detective Paul Hembry,” I said, my every breath bursting out of me in a sick, rasping wheeze. “Now.”

On the other end of the line, I could hear the static of police radios crackling and squawking every few seconds. Papers rustling, phones ringing. A man shouting something about a “Ten-Sixteen on Plymill Drive.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” the woman on the phone replied. “Detective Hembry is unavailable at the moment. If you’d like, I can connect you to his extension, and you can leave a message on his voice-mail?”

“I don’t want to talk to his voice-mail,” I said. “I want to talk to Detective Hembry.”

“Excuse me, sir,” she said, “But I just told you—”

“Put Detective Hembry on the phone. Now.”

“I don’t think I appreciate your tone, sir.”

I sighed. Took a deep breath. Tried to calm down a bit as that old cliché about honey and vinegar came to mind…

“Look,” I said. “Tell him… tell him it’s Andrew Holland. Please, ma’am? He’ll know what this is about.”

A pause. She knew too. Of course. Everyone did.

“Hold on, Mr. Holland. Detective Hembry is in a meeting, but I’ll see if I can get him on the phone.”

“Th-thank you,” I said, my voice cracking. “Thank you, ma’am.”

As I waited, a vein twitched in my forehead. I stared out the window over the sink at Norman sniffing around in the backyard, and I thought, This is what it feels like to lose your mind. Yep. This is it. I am having a nervous breakdown.

Several minutes passed.

Finally, a familiar voice said in my ear, “Detective Hembry can’t come to the phone right now. This is Detective Lieutenant Erik Norton. How can I help you?”

Shit. Norton. I hadn’t expected this.

But he would have to suffice.

I licked my dry lips, said, “Detective Norton? Andrew Holland.”

“Mr. Holland.” His voice conveyed no emotion. “What seems to be the problem?”

“I need to ask you a question,” I said.

“Yes?”

“I need to know what I can do about someone messing around in my garbage.”

“Come again?”

“I need to know if it’s against the law for someone to dig through my trash. How does that work? Legally, I mean? That’s still my private property, isn’t it?”

“Hmm,” Norton said. “What an odd question. You know, Mr. Holland, I am very busy right now—”

“They think I did it,” I said.

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Rebecca Lanning. The girl I found. My neighbors think I did it. They think I… killed her.”

I heard him clear his throat on the other end of the line.

I waited.

“What makes you say that, Mr. Holland?”

I swallowed, took a deep breath. “This morning I woke up to find my garbage spilled all over my lawn.”

“So?” Norton said.

“They were looking for something.”

“Looking for something.”

“Yes.”

“With all due respect, Mr. Holland, it sounds to me like you’re being more than a little paranoid.”

I ran one hand through my sweaty hair. Collapsed in a chair at my kitchen table. I nearly dropped the phone. It felt heavy, too heavy. Maybe Norton was right, I realized. Because my predicament did sound ridiculous when I tried to put it into words. Like an overused plot in a thousand generic thrillers. I’ll be damned, I thought, stifling a sick chuckle that bubbled up from inside of me, I’ve become a walking cliché. Yet all of this was really happening. No matter how silly my plight appeared to someone on the outside looking in, the proof of my neighbors’ animosity toward me lay all over my driveway. On my front lawn. It was crammed in one pocket of my pajamas, like a filthy secret. It had been hanging from my mailbox, a symbol of their twisted suspicions and vile, misguided assumptions…

They truly believed I liked making little girls bleed.

“Jesus Christ,” I moaned through clenched teeth. “I thought I knew these people.”

“You’ve got to understand where I’m coming from, sir,” said Detective Norton. “For an innocent man, you do seem awfully concerned about what your neighbors think. There wasn’t anything for them to find in your garbage, correct? You’ve got nothing to hide.”

I started gnawing at my fingernails. It was a nasty habit I had kicked for a decade, but now it returned worse than ever. I didn’t know what to say. Should I tell him more, or would doing so only make matters worse? I kept thinking about Detective Norton’s questions concerning my brush with the law, about his mention of a DNA test that first day I had met him. I was free and clear now, as far as the authorities were concerned. Hembry had said it himself, and his statement was quoted by the Tribune. They had never followed through with their request for a blood sample after all. But I knew that could change at any moment. If I said the wrong thing…

“Mr. Holland?” Norton said. “They didn’t find anything, did they?”

“Yeah,” I said. “They did.”

I heard his chair squeak as he sat up in it, as he suddenly grew more attentive to my dilemma than he had been at the start of our conversation.

“It’s not what they think,” I said. “They’ve got it all wrong.”

“I’m listening.”

“Last Wednesday, my daughter was visiting. She’s eleven years old. While she was here, she… she got her first period.”

“Go on.”

“Afterwards, I threw her… bloody underwear… in the trash. It was the most innocent thing in the world, Detective. Her panties were ruined, so I threw them away. But someone… my neighbors… they dug through my garbage in the middle of the night… like fucking vigilantes… and they found them. Th-they… they found Samantha’s panties, and they… hung them up… outside… as if they had solved this whole goddamn case on their own. As if they had discovered some sort of proof… ”

“Proof of what, exactly?” Norton said.

I slammed a fist down on the tabletop, wanting to lash out at something. Someone. Anyone.

“Fuck!” I shouted into the phone. I held my head in my hands. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

Detective Norton said, “I really don’t know what to say, Mr. Holland, other than to tell you… if your neighbors are so convinced that you had something to do with Rebecca Lanning’s murder, I would think they would have reported what they found by now. I doubt they would just leave their ‘evidence’ right there for you to find.”

“Unless it was a warning.”

“What do you mean?”

“Unless they’re planning to take the law into their own hands,” I said.

“I highly doubt that’s the case, sir.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“I’m assuming you missed my partner’s statement in last Thursday’s Tribune,” said Detective Norton. “It was right there in black and white, on the front page. You are not a suspect.”

“I saw it,” I said. “But I’m starting to think I’m the only one. Apparently my neighbors don’t read the Tribune. Or they’ve made up their minds already, and don’t give a shit what the police have to say.”

“Mr. Holland, I’ve worked in this business long enough to know that people believe what they see on the six o’clock news, what they read in the paper. Whether it’s the truth or not.”

“That’s precisely what I’m afraid of,” I said.

“Listen, sir—”

“Sure, they printed your partner’s statement. But a lot of damn good it did, don’tcha think, when they negate that in the next paragraph by dredging up something that happened when I was twenty years old? The media is crucifying me, Detective, in case you hadn’t noticed! Because I write horror. Because of a stupid mistake I made when I was just a fucking kid—”

Norton’s new tone indicated he was speaking to someone whose mental faculties were nil. He sounded tired, fed up: “You’ve been cleared, Mr. Holland. Beyond that, my department has no control over what the media does or does not choose to print. Your conviction is a matter of public record, in case you had forgotten. Still, despite this conspiracy you’re convinced your neighbors are plotting against you… I think if you’ll just give it time, you’ll realize that last article in the Tribune went a long way toward—”

“What’s taking you so long to catch this son of a bitch, anyway?” I interjected. “Maybe if you would hurry up and catch the real killer, these people would get off my back…”

He didn’t appreciate that. At all. “There’s no need to shout. We are doing the best we can. Now, look—”

“I don’t think I’m safe here anymore,” I said. “I think I may be in danger.”

“Danger?”

“I think they might try to… hurt me.”

“This isn’t one of your novels, Mr. Holland. This is real life.”

I barely refrained from telling the prick where he could shove his shiny fucking badge and his condescending attitude.

“This is going nowhere.” I heard Detective Norton’s chair squeak again in the background, as if he was already standing up, preparing to end this call whether I liked it or not. “It is not my intention to be rude, but I honestly have more important things to do with my time, sir.”

“Of course you do,” I said.

“Now, if you’d like to file a complaint in regards to the vandalism on your property, I can put you through to an officer who will take care of that for you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Okay. Maybe I should do that.”

I wondered briefly if I should also file a complaint about Officer Keith Whitmire, and the conversation I had overheard several days ago at the Beechams’ place. At the very least, perhaps I should tell Norton about it? But then, what crime had Whitmire committed against me? He was a cop, one of their own, so I knew it would be futile.

“Understand, however, that our hands are tied unless you caught the culprit in the act,” Norton was saying.

“In other words, you’re not gonna do a damn thing about it.”

“I didn’t say that. But what do you expect us to do? Arrest the whole neighborhood?”

“Of course not.”

“Well…?”

“Forget it. Just… forget it.”

“Fine. Your call. Have a nice day, Mr. Holland.”

I gripped the phone so tight its plastic casing creaked and popped in my hands.

“You have a wonderful day too, Detective,” I said. “Thanks for nothing.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

For several disoriented seconds I had no idea what awakened me. I knew that something had dragged me out of my deep, alcohol-induced slumber, yet I couldn’t be sure what, exactly…

A dream?

No. This was something real. Tangible.

A suspicious noise. Nearby. In the middle of the night.

My first thought: Was there an intruder in my house? Had someone broken in?

I cursed as I sat up, trying to clear the lingering wisps of sleep-fog from my brain. My head felt swollen to twice its normal size, as if it were filled with nothing but swirling hot air, and a bittersweet residue seemed to coat the insides of my mouth. Earlier that evening, I had finally popped open the bottle of Chardonnay I brought home with me the day I caught Karen cheating, and I had polished it off in record time. Though I have never been the type of guy who attempts to wash away his problems with chemical substances, if nothing else the wine’s numbing effects did grant me the courage to sneak outside under the cover of darkness, to at last clean up the scattered debris that had turned my property into an eyesore for the last thirty-six hours.

I glanced at the clock by my bed, yawned. Glowing numbers the color of freshly spilt blood informed me that the time was 3:34 a.m.

For those next few minutes, I just sat there in the darkness of my bedroom. I tried to convince myself that there existed a perfectly logical, innocent explanation for a noise loud enough to jerk me from inebriated sleep in the wee hours of the morning. There had to be. Because I did not want to consider the alternative.

I didn’t move. I didn’t breathe. I just sat there. Straining to hear it again. Whatever it was…

Norman started barking in the backyard.

My heart skipped a beat. The retriever’s gruff voice ripped through the otherwise tranquil night, and although the sound was muffled through the house’s walls I could feel the vibrations of his tirade in the headboard of my bed.

If I had not known it before, there was no doubt in my mind now—someone was out there. Messing around on my property.

Again.

From the front yard: a metallic crash. Like a shopping cart being kicked over, skidding across asphalt.

That was followed by a chorus of deep, masculine laughter.

My heart slammed in my chest. A rash of goosebumps sprouted over my naked arms like a million frigid pinpricks.

What the hell…?

A low thump. Like something heavy dropped onto my front porch.

A woman’s giggle.

“Do it, man! Do it!” a male voice commanded.

More drunken laughter filled the street outside.

Then I leapt out of bed, nearly colliding with the wall. Were those footsteps on my roof?

An awkward clumping/shuffling din overhead, like someone climbing onto the eaves at the front of the house. A sharp squeal of metal, like a gutter being knocked loose and scraping against vinyl siding. A few seconds later, the sound of pacing up there… back and forth, back and forth…

I stared at my bedroom ceiling, stunned.

From outside: another dull thud. A smoker’s cough. It obviously came from the person on the roof—a man—and sounded as if he were right there in the room with me.

Norman began to bark more furiously than ever, his urgent call echoing up and down the block like an army of angry retrievers.

“Wish his dog would shut its trap,” someone said.

“Don’t worry about him.” A younger, female voice this time. “He’s harmless.”

“Woof, Norman, woof!” I heard one of the fuckers taunt my dog. “Grrrrr!”

“Quit screwin’ around, you guys. We gonna do this or what?”

A labored grunt. More heavy footfalls overhead.

“Hurry up! Gimme it. Easy… there we go…”

In a sort of low, stiff-legged crabwalk, I at last began to creep down the hallway, toward the front of the house, cringing each time the floorboards creaked beneath my feet.

The night was hot and sticky. I had been sleeping in nothing but a pair of ratty old gym socks and the Batman boxers Sam bought for me last Father’s Day. As I passed the bathroom, I grabbed my robe from the hook on the door, threw it on.

Next I took a detour into the kitchen, retrieved the Maglite from atop the refrigerator.

I wrapped both hands around it. The flashlight felt heavy as hell in my grip. Huge. Lethal. Good…

When I stepped back into the hallway, though, I almost dropped it. I froze again. The temperature around me seemed to plummet a thousand degrees.

“What the fuck?”

A trio of faceless black forms stood on my front porch, gazing into the house through my living room window like lost souls trapped in limbo, peering into the land of the living. Their tall, misshapen shadows stretched onto my carpet in twitching obsidian pools, and something about that more than anything else filled me with an icy terror the likes of which I had never known before. As if even the window’s triple-paned glass could not deny the intruders entry to my private domain. They would eventually bleed through, and get inside…

“Heads up!” someone shouted. “He’s coming!”

Another voice: “Shit! Move, hoss, move!”

Dull bluish moonlight washed into the room as the figures in the window vanished.

“Go! Go! Go!”

A thunderous cacophony of footsteps clunked and pounded on the porch.

A woman squealed.

“Yee-haaaa, Martha!” bellowed a man with a thick Southern drawl. “Time to pay the piper!”

And then the night exploded with a resounding CRASH. The unmistakable sound of glass shattering.

I ran for the door, wielding the Maglite like a club.

I fumbled with the deadbolt for what felt like forever. Fought with the chain for another eternity. Cursed my jittery, useless fingers.

Outside, Norman’s barking grew to a fever pitch. His grating yelp filled the night with an unending staccato barrage. I imagined him red-eyed and foaming at the mouth, transformed into something feral and malevolent, a snarling blond beast that looked nothing like the beautiful, friendly-to-a-fault retriever I once knew.

I threw open the door and staggered outside.

Madness greeted me on my front lawn. Chaos. Everywhere I looked, silhouettes sprinted through my yard, scattering in all directions like a swarm of spindly black demons escaping into the night. How many? A dozen, maybe more. They spilled from my driveway, from both sides of the house, melting into the impenetrable darkness beyond my property. Their fleeing footsteps whispered through the grass like a thousand obscene sighs, thwapped upon the blacktopped driveway in an odd counter-rhythm to my own frantic heartbeat. Several of the scampering forms tripped and fell as they fled, but then immediately leapt to their feet again and scurried away, spider-like, before I had a chance to confront them.

“What… who… what are you—” I babbled, my mouth hanging open as I watched that ebony sea of faceless figures flood the neighborhood.

Normally, the streetlight between Donna Dunaway’s and the Beechams’ properties across the street would have illuminated enough of my yard to make out the trespassers’ features. Its bulb had burned out a month ago, however, and our local power company had not gotten around to replacing it yet.

Some of them might have looked familiar—in the shapes and sizes of their bodies, the way they moved—but even the night conspired against me. It hung like a thick black veil around the edges of my property, and it seemed to grow thicker and blacker as I squinted through the darkness, trying to identify just one of my tormentors…

Was that Sal Friedman’s stooped shape shambling down the block? Impossible. How could the old geezer move so fast? Was that Ernie Tomblin colliding with my mailbox in his rush to get away? For a second I thought I even spotted… Glenn Sommersville and his wife Charlene? Charlene Sommersville had been undergoing radiation treatments for breast cancer the last few months, but the way her gaunt silhouette darted and zigzagged across my lawn like an Olympic track star made me wonder if her disease hadn’t been a filthy lie all along. That is, if the figures were the Sommersvilles. I couldn’t be sure. Nor could I be sure if that was Lorne Childress, Freddy Morgan, or tall, lanky Doc McFarland cutting through my next-door neighbor’s front yard as he raced like mad for home.

As I watched my neighbors retreat into the night, I felt helpless, disoriented, perhaps still a bit intoxicated from my fling with the bottle of chardonnay earlier that evening. None of this made any sense.

Slowly, like a zombie from one of my novels, I descended the steps of my front porch and stumbled out onto the lawn, oddly mesmerized by the mayhem before me. I could only stand there, my mouth hanging open, as I fought to understand what the hell was going on here.

After a few more seconds, the crowd had dissipated entirely.

Several houses down, a door slammed like a small-caliber gunshot in the night. A garage door rattled down its track somewhere on the other side of the street.

Then everything was still. So still. My yard was empty. The road was clear. And quiet as the grave…

My own heavy breathing was the only sound on Poinsettia Lane now, my trampled lawn the only proof that anyone had ever been there at all. Even Norman’s tantrum had faded to a series of confused whimpers.

I raised my head toward the starless night sky, and I screamed at the top of my lungs, “What do you people want from me?!”

My voice echoed through the neighborhood like a mischievous phantom mocking my rage.

I ran one hand through my sleep-tousled hair. Took several faltering steps forward, into the middle of the yard, as I wondered what to do next. My socks made squishy noises in the dewy grass, clung to my feet like a second soggy skin.

I came to my senses when I looked down and saw the long black flashlight in my hand. I could have smacked myself! A lot of good the flashlight had done me moments ago, when I needed it most.

I clicked it on, and the Maglite’s bright white beam split apart the night. The bushes at the edge of my yard twitched and rustled with the movements of nocturnal creatures within, and I might have even glimpsed several pairs of glowing yellow eyes peering back at me, reflecting the light. But I paid them no mind. I swung the flashlight back and forth, from one side of my property to the other. Then I did again, only this time in a slower arc…

When the light struck my Explorer in the driveway, my balls crawled up inside of my abdomen. My bowels lurched.

My vision blurred and my knees grew weak as I approached the vehicle.

“Oh, no…”

A gaping, silver-white mouth grinned at me from the center of the Explorer’s windshield. I shined the beam through that jagged hole, and identified the cause of it: a massive concrete block. That explained the sounds on my roof, I realized. Whoever had done this had climbed atop my house in order to give the heavy projectile the momentum required for it to bust through my windshield. The driver-side window had also been shattered. And a headlight. Broken glass sparkled and glimmered upon the Explorer’s upholstery and across my blacktopped driveway as if a blizzard of diamonds had blown through town while I slept.

“Shit!”

The Explorer’s tires had been slashed as well. Their low, serpentine hiss seemed to swirl around me in a taunting whisper as the vehicle hunkered down onto its rims like a fatigued old beast conceding to its dire fate.

The worst part, though, was the vile message my neighbors had left for me down one side of my demolished SUV.

Though the Maglite’s beam bobbed and jerked and wavered every which way in my trembling hands, that horrible slogan scrawled across the Explorer’s driver-side door was as legible as it would have been had I discovered it in the light of the morning sun. Gouged deep into the Explorer’s paintjob, not with a key but with a knife or an icepick or some other very sharp object, it read:

“Oh, Jesus,” I whispered. “Jesus…”

I grew light-headed, felt as if I might pass out right there in the middle of my glass-speckled driveway.

“Short Eyes,” I remembered from my research on one novel seven or eight years ago, is what convicts call pedophiles in prison.

Short Eyes… demented dregs of humanity who get off on hurting children.

I dropped the flashlight. It clattered onto the pavement, flickered once but did not die.

If I had not known it before, I knew unequivocally what my neighbors thought of me now.

Detective Norton had been wrong. So wrong.

I was in danger. More and more, with every passing second.

I ran for home.

On my way, a noise caught my attention from nearby. A soft tapping sound, like a flurry of cotton balls bouncing off glass…

Next door, Ben Souther always kept one of those bright yellow bug lights burning on his front porch after dark. The kind that is designed to repel moths and other nocturnal insects, but it usually only draws them in droves.

As I glanced over there, wondering somewhere in the back of my mind if old Ben might have stepped out this evening with the rest of Poinsettia Lane… the light blinked out.

The pitch-black night closed in around me. Smothering me. Watching me with a thousand unseen eyes.

Like something alive. And hungry.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

My hands were shaking so badly I could barely hold my cell phone as I punched the three numbers: 911.

Not that calling the police did me a damn bit of good. Again.

I rubbed my eyes, yawned. I watched the glowing green numbers on my microwave clock change from 3:48 to 3:49 a.m. as a husky-voiced woman informed me that an officer would arrive “momentarily” to investigate my complaint.

I sat. Waited. Drank a pot of coffee.

Waited some more.

The officer in question—a diminutive, curly-haired fellow by the name of D. SANCHEZ according to the brass nametag above his badge—finally arrived an hour-and-a-half later, as the morning sun rose over Poinsettia Lane. When his black and white patrol car pulled to a stop mere inches behind my ravaged SUV, those first golden rays of dawn glinted off its hood like a taunting wink my way.

The neighborhood was still quiet. Too quiet. A lone early bird chirped from somewhere within the copse of trees beyond my property. A soft breeze sighed through Marianne Souther’s rhododendron bushes.

Meanwhile, my neighbors watched us from behind closed doors. Through thin gaps in parted curtains. I did not see them, but I knew they were there. I could feel their hateful eyes upon me.

Officer Sanchez wasted no time in taking my statement, filing his report. He walked around my Explorer at least a dozen times, inspecting it with a sort of dull, halfhearted interest as if it were some curious archeological find he knew should impress him but he couldn’t quite wrap his brain around it. His brow creased as he nodded sympathetically and mumbled helpful phrases like “hmmm” and “did quite a number on it” and “that’s not good at all.” I couldn’t stop thinking as I watched him work that he barely looked seven or eight years older than my daughter. Just a kid, fresh out of cop school. He even sported a childish smattering of freckles across his nose and cheeks.

I shoved my hands in my pockets, stared numbly off into space while he peered through the Explorer’s shattered windshield at the concrete block lying in the front seat. He jotted something down on his notepad. Studied the block again. Scribbled something else.

A few minutes later, as he rounded the driver’s side one last time, he said, “Short Eyes.”

He turned to look at me with a sick little grimace. As if he had eaten something bad for breakfast and was only now beginning to feel its repercussions.

“You do know what that means,” he said, but it was more a statement than a question.

I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. Started gnawing at my fingernails. I nodded.

All told, he remained on my property for a total of about twenty minutes. And the verdict proved no different than thirty-six hours before, when I informed Detective Erik Norton that someone had been digging through my garbage.

Young Officer Sanchez put his notepad away, and said, “We’ll be in touch.”

Broken glass crunched beneath his boots as he returned to his patrol car.

“So… that’s it?” I said.

“Yes, sir,” he replied. “For now. Of course, we will be speaking with your neighbors over the next few days. We’ll ask around, find out if anyone saw anything.”

My neighbors, I thought. Now there’s a novel idea, Officer Sanchez. Because they can sure as hell answer any questions you might have about what happened here…

He paused as he climbed back into his vehicle, and he turned to look at me with an expression that seemed to indicate he felt sorry for me. I wondered if he knew the details of my predicament, if perhaps after my last call to the boys in blue I had become the laughing stock of the entire police department. For that matter, I wondered if he was buddies with Keith Whitmire. If they went out drinking together after work several nights a week…

No. I doubted Officer Sanchez was old enough to imbibe.

“Can I make a suggestion, Mr. Holland?” he said. “Just between you and me?”

“Sure.”

“Don’t get your hopes up, okay?”

“What do you mean?”

“Cases like this, ya gotta understand… if you didn’t catch the perp in the act, it’s rare that anything ever comes of it.”

“Right,” I said.

“And even then, it’s your word against theirs.”

I shook my head, stared at my shoes. Bit my tongue so hard I tasted blood.

“Just so you know, sir. It is a long shot. Without any physical evidence—fingerprints, et cetera—there’s not a whole lot we can do. I’m just sayin’… you shouldn’t sit around expecting something that—to be perfectly honest with you—is probably not gonna happen.”

“Of course not,” I said. “I’d never do that.”

I tried to keep the sarcasm out of my voice. I knew he meant well. But my efforts were futile.

“Have a nice day, Mr. Holland,” said Officer Sanchez. “Hang in there.”

The radio on his dashboard squawked and trilled like a dying bird as he slammed his car door. He gave me a little salute through the window before starting the engine. I watched him back out of my driveway, then cruise slowly down Poinsettia Lane.

I sighed, just kept shaking my head. Wondered when, exactly, he planned on speaking to my neighbors. Certainly not today, judging from the direction he was headed. His patrol car did not stop until it reached the end of my street, its brake lights flashing briefly in the pinkish half-light of dawn before the car turned right onto Brookshire Boulevard.

Feeling more hopeless than I had ever felt in my life, I headed back inside.

I crawled into bed, curled up in a fetal position beneath the covers.

I did not sleep, however. No way could I go back to sleep even if I had wanted to.

I just lay there for several long hours, staring at the wall. Through the wall…

Wishing I could be far, far away.

***

When I finally dragged my ass out of bed that morning around eleven o’clock, I called Rick’s Flatbed Service to come haul away the Explorer. Subsequent conversations with Bill’s Body Shop and 12th Avenue Tire across town proved frustrating at best. Both informed me—with a snide sort of delight, I thought, but surely I imagined as much due to my own wretched mood—that they were extremely backlogged and the earliest they could start repair on my SUV would be a week from the following Monday.

“Whatever,” I said as I hung up.

I felt numbed by it all, not the least bit surprised.

And in some strange, detached way, I wondered if I even really cared.

PART TWO

August 1 - August 8

CHAPTER NINETEEN

A few days later, I found another message from my neighbors.

This one had been snipped from the Harris Weekly Independent (“The Heart o’ the Matter” Op-Ed feature on Page 2), and was stapled to my front door:

WHO IS ANDREW HOLLAND?

(Portrait of a Scaremonger)

By Jeremy Webster, Editor-In-Chief

According to police reports, successful local author Andrew Holland claims he was merely walking his Golden Retriever “Norman”—a name that, according to friends and neighbors, was inspired by cross-dressing serial killer Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's classic thriller Psycho—along Poinsettia Lane on July 17th. Holland claims that he simply “happened to find” the body of nine-year-old Rebecca Lanning on a construction site located at 229 Poinsettia Lane (the writer lives at 217 Poinsettia Lane). According to the coroner’s report filed on July 21st, this poor, innocent child had been savagely raped before she was murdered.

What am I getting at, you ask?

Leave it to me, faithful readers, to ask the uncomfortable questions. After all, it’s my job.

Frankly, friends… I am beginning to wonder if the monster in Harrison County’s midst isn’t closer than we all think.

To date, no charges have been filed in the investigation of Rebecca Lanning’s murder, and the Harris City Police Department has yet to name any suspects. Meanwhile, Detective Paul Hembry, who co-heads the investigation with Lieutenant Detective Erik Norton, has stated several times now that Andrew Holland is not under consideration as a suspect. And yet, one must wonder if discounting Holland as a suspect is a wise decision. It is worth noting that the novelist was the first person to discover Rebecca Lanning’s body—a body that had been a living, breathing little girl with hopes and dreams and aspirations of one day becoming a veterinarian, according to her grieving mother—minutes before Andrew Holland happened across the scene. One has to wonder exactly how many minutes separated the child’s death and the “discovery” of her corpse? What margin of error might there be? Could law enforcement officials be ignoring a simple yet horrific possibility? A plausible deduction that, for reasons unknown, they don’t seem to be considering or, when confronted with it, aren’t taking as seriously as they should be?

Far be it from me to make accusations that have not yet been made by the very professionals who have sworn to protect and serve our county.

Still, it is something to think about.

As a journalist (going on thirty years now) who attempts to always look beyond what lies directly in front of my face, I have found myself pondering these burning questions on more than one occasion during the last few tumultuous weeks. Judging from the numerous phone calls, letters, and e-mails I have received from this community, I am far from alone in my speculation. Recently, certain dark truths about Andrew Holland have bubbled to the surface—truths that, upon consideration, this journalist feels should be taken into account posthaste. As my suspicions and curiosities are shared by many concerned residents of Harrison County, I feel that it is my duty to provide the public with clear, accurate information about the man named Andrew Holland…

Andrew Kenneth Holland was born on December 27th, —— in Jackson, Tennessee to hardworking middle-class parents. His father, Randall James Holland, worked in hazardous materials; he died from a heart attack six years ago. His mother, Amanda Rene Holland, currently resides in Newark, New Jersey, where she recently retired after serving as an English teacher for forty-plus years. After graduating from North Jackson High School in Jacksonville, Tennessee, Andrew Holland went on to enroll at Jackson County Community College, but eventually dropped out to pursue a full-time career as a novelist. When he was twenty-one years old, Glenn DeCarlo Press contracted his first novel Wolf Moon—a story about a pack of werewolves living in the subways of New York City—and not long after his debut was published the movie adaptation of Wolf Moon titillated theatergoers the world over with its unflinching depictions of murder and bestiality.

The rest, as they say, is history. Andrew Holland was soon laughing all the way to the bank.

On May 3rd, ——, Andrew married Karen Kimberly Cook of Gatlinburg, Tennessee. The couple eschewed traditional Protestant vows in favor of a wedding ceremony with more Celtic-Pagan themes. Their only child, Samantha Rene Holland, was born on September 5, ——. The couple divorced less than amicably this past April (as a result of infidelity, according to one source close to the Hollands, who asked to remain anonymous). Although Andrew and Karen share joint custody of 11-year-old Samantha, she lives with her mother and only sees her father on Wednesdays and every other weekend.

At first glance, the only thing that seems to differentiate Andrew Holland from his neighborhood peers is his unusual career. He is the author of thirteen novels, most of which have been translated into multiple languages for international markets, and he doesn’t appear ready to slow down any time soon. As someone who works in print myself, my first inclination is to applaud Holland on his success. Yet it hardly takes more than a cursory glance at this horror writer’s career to see that his work is of a very unsettling nature on the whole. Holland’s stories more often than not contain disturbing passages of meticulously detailed sex, violence, and gore. His books are well written, arguably, but their subject matter forces one to wonder how deep runs the dark crevasse in Andrew Holland’s psyche. Even Stephen King and Clive Barker, two of the most notable and best-selling “terror scribes” of all time, have taken extended breaks from the morbid and macabre to craft tales with a less sinister bent. Adolescents the world over have found King’s The Eyes of the Dragon and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon to be delightful reads free of the grue that pervades his better-known horror bestsellers, and Barker (creator of Hellraiser) has written The Thief of Always and Abarat, which are aimed squarely at young readers.

What does Holland have on the market other than his popular adult horror novels? Nothing under his own name, to be sure. Using the too-clever-for-its-own-good pseudonym of “Anthony Dutch”, he has published the popular “Frightsville, U.S.A.” series for Young Adults. There are currently four books in this series, but their depth and content are easily recognized thanks to grotesque titles such as Cannibal High and Devil’s Detention. To date, Holland has shown no interest whatsoever in penning anything that isn’t of the macabre variety, even when given a chance to write for a more impressionable audience.

For residents of Harrison County, Holland’s work can point out some very chilling parallels with real life if we are willing to look deep enough. As previously stated, his books often contain extremely violent content, as well as bizarre sexual situations that quite often extend well beyond the line of perversion. Worse yet is the fact that, in his written works at least, Holland shows no hesitation at putting child characters in grim situations. His latest novel, Slow Burn, is a perfect example of such a shameless “talent.” This novel—which earlier this year debuted at #7 on the New York Times bestseller list—is about a serial killing man-of-the-cloth who douses pregnant women with gasoline then sets them on fire because he believes they are possessed by demons. As if that thought wasn’t repellent in itself, Holland describes in great detail the grotesque acts performed by the novel’s antagonist as he burns his victims alive. One scene involving the charred corpse of an unborn child is simply too horrendous to describe within the pages of this periodical; in fact, I would call most of the narrative downright offensive. How anyone could in good conscience make up such repugnant scenarios in the name of “entertainment” is beyond my comprehension.

Perhaps the novel that deserves a deeper amount of scrutiny, though, is A Cold Dark Place. If ever a more sadistic and depraved novel exists, I am not familiar with it. The novel in question—Holland’s fifth—focuses on a vile serial killer who preys upon young children. Their murders are graphic and explicit, even if they are described in forensic flashbacks. From beginning to end, A Cold Dark Place is a painful read for the sensitive reader, and one has to wonder how such ideas could occur to any healthy human psyche.

It has often been stated by writers and artists alike that a great deal of their own beliefs, experiences, and personality are infused within their work. Often, novels are thinly-veiled explorations of concepts and preoccupations harbored by the authors themselves. Literary great Ernest Hemingway experienced a great deal of tragedy in his romantic life. His writing reflects this, as nearly every major female character in his work eventually abandons or betrays the central male character. If such things are true for all writers, what are we to believe when we read the works of Andrew Holland?

You don’t have to take my word for it, faithful reader. Perhaps we should go straight to the source…

In an interview with Parade magazine eleven years ago, Holland boasted, “I think I’m a little bit different from most folks, sure. People don’t like to talk about the dark side of life, the things that lurk in the shadows… (but) horror writers, we like stepping into the darkness. We live there. And we enjoy every minute of it. It’s like a roller-coaster ride, you know? Our fans enjoy being scared. I know I do. But now I get to build the roller-coaster. And there ain’t a better job in this world.”

In an interview with People magazine six years ago, Holland gleefully admitted, “Yeah, I’m twisted. Some might even say I’m a sick son of a b***h.”

Statements like these certainly serve to punctuate his obsession with murder and depravity, and his enjoyment in creating the disturbing stories that find their way into our local bookshops as best-selling novels (personally, the fact that such works are so immensely popular brings to mind the old saying “a fool and his money are soon parted,” but maybe that’s just me—there is no accounting for taste, after all). But analysis of this man’s career and his own views on his writing are merely the tip of the proverbial iceberg. There is other evidence of Holland’s potentially disturbing mindset that has recently come to light, and anyone willing to examine the writer’s life in detail would be shocked at what he or she finds.

On February 18, —, at the age of twenty, Andrew Holland was arrested on statutory rape charges after he was caught having sex with a sixteen-year-old girl. Found by the victim’s undoubtedly mortified father, Holland would eventually plead guilty to the charges against him. He was fined one thousand dollars and sentenced to a year of supervised probation.

This information, combined with the content of some of Holland’s more extreme novels like A Cold Dark Place, can easily be viewed as pieces of a very dark, disturbing jigsaw puzzle. Surely investigating Detectives Hembry and Norton have noticed this? Surely Holland himself has noticed this? He seems like a smart man, after all. But the horror writer has thus far neglected to put forth any effort to be open with a community that is already fearfully on edge. He has ventured in quite the opposite direction, in fact. According to those who know him best—his fellow residents of Poinsettia Lane—Holland has continually refused to comment on the case in question, and he appears to have become increasingly solitary, rarely leaving his home or interacting with others unless it is absolutely necessary. Attempts to contact Holland via his agent—Theresa Gregory of Suttles, Gregory, & Hare in New York City—have gone unanswered. Holland’s sudden estrangement from any kind of social interaction has understandably raised more than a few eyebrows throughout this frightened community.

Floyd Beecham, a neighbor of Andrew Holland’s, had the following to say recently about the novelist: “He stays cooped up inside (his house) all the time… what are the rest of us supposed to think?”

Another neighbor, Eileen Tuttle, said: “Andy always kept to himself. He was a friendly enough fellow if you initiated the conversation, I guess, but he never let anyone get too close.”

One Poinsettia Lane resident who asked to remain anonymous said: “You pass someone on the street every day, you wave hello. But you never really know what’s inside a person. And (I think) that’s the scariest thing of all.”

Yet another anonymous neighbor stated: “I drank a beer with Andy now and then, we chatted about baseball, but I wouldn’t exactly call us ‘friends.’ I never knew him well at all, to be honest. I just hope and pray he didn’t have anything to do with (Rebecca Lanning’s murder).”

Holland has not only cut himself off from his friends and neighbors. It would seem he is attempting to distance himself from the rest of the world as well, including his own devoted fan base. The writer has an official website—sponsored by his publisher—where he used to correspond regularly with his readers. At press time, however, Holland had neither posted on that forum nor updated his popular Facebook page for several weeks.

At a time when citizens are horrified by an act that defies all sense of decency, the first person to have “discovered” that it happened has suddenly (some might say suspiciously) drawn away from the people who need to communicate with him the most.

Take Ronnie “Round Man” Miller, for example. Miller was once a strong supporter of Holland. It wasn’t so long ago that, when customers walked through the doors of the 7th Avenue Stop-N-Shop which Miller owns and operates, they would find a rack next to his cash register filled with signed copies of Andrew Holland’s books. A lot has changed in the last few weeks, however. The rack by Round Man’s register is now empty, and Holland’s works have vanished from the store altogether. Their absence—like Holland’s own, of late—is conspicuous, to say the least. Miller declined to comment on why Holland’s books are no longer present in his store, but there are times when what’s missing is the most important evidence to be considered. And what isn’t said is often more revealing than what is.

I can only hope, for the sake of Harrison County, that Detectives Paul Hembry and Erik Norton are perceptive enough to realize this as well.

Before it is too late.

Before another Rebecca Lanning is “discovered” on Poinsettia Lane.

CHAPTER TWENTY

When I was a kid, my favorite uncle used to have this saying. Around a mouthful of chewing tobacco, while he stared out his living room window and watched a particularly nasty storm pummel his twelve-and-a-half acres of Appalachian farmland, he would swear it was “raining to beat the Devil.”

Uncle Fred’s old adage never failed to make me laugh, even as it filled my impressionable young brain with a plethora of cloven-hoofed nightmare images.

Now, on a Saturday evening four days after the good people of Poinsettia Lane destroyed my Explorer, I doubt there had ever been a more apt description for the drenched gray world outside my window.

Indeed, it was “raining to beat the Devil”… on the day my best friend died.

***

“Dad?” Samantha called out to me from the kitchen, where I hoped she wasn’t making too much of a mess as she fixed herself a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich for an afternoon snack.

I hit control-S on my keyboard, quick-saving the last page I had written on A Feast of Souls, before replying, “What is it, baby?”

“Can I watch The Fly?”

“Which one?”

“The one Grandpa Nickolas got you for your birthday. That guy from Jurassic Park’s in it? And the mom from Stuart Little?”

“Sounds like you’ve already seen it a couple times, sweet-pea.”

“Can I?”

“Better not. Your mother would squash me like a fly if she knew I let you watch gooey stuff like that.”

“What about the old one? Do you have it on DVD?”

I grinned from ear to ear in spite of myself, shook my head. Samantha certainly was her father’s daughter, no doubt about it. I couldn’t have been more proud.

“It’s in there somewhere, Sam. You’ll just have to look for it.”

“Never mind,” she said. “I’ll just watch cartoons.”

“Okay, hon. Just keep the volume down, will you? I’m trying to work in here.”

Outside, a vicious summer storm batted against the house like some malevolent creature trying to get inside. Wormy gray raindrops wriggled their way down my office window, obscuring the world beyond. Thunder rumbled and boomed like a celestial battle being waged in the clouds above Poinsettia Lane. But I didn’t mind. The sounds of a storm were always perfect background noise for creating tales within my chosen genre. I loved every second of it.

“Dad?”

I frowned, stopped typing in the middle of a sentence. Tried not to sound too agitated.

“What do you need, short-stuff?”

“Can I have a Dr Pepper?”

“It’ll rot your teeth.”

“Please?”

“Go ahead. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

I returned to my work, but finally admitted to myself that it wasn’t going well at all. I’d had a hell of a time trying to concentrate anyway the last couple days, after that infuriating editorial in the Weekly Independent.

Screw it. I decided I would finish the chapter in progress, then it might be best to just wrap things up and go spend some time with Sam.

I didn’t even get that far, however. About five minutes later, I heard my daughter’s footsteps pattering down the hallway. She burst into my office at the exact moment a bright white flash of lightning lit up the room.

The lights flickered. We both flinched.

“Dad?” Sam said. She was breathing heavily, as if she had just run a few laps around the block. “I think you’d better come here. Quick.”

I swiveled around in my chair to face her. “Why? What’s the matter?”

“I think there’s something wrong with Norman.”

At first, I thought I had misunderstood her. A vicious crack of thunder—like the sound of our house suddenly splitting in half—nearly drowned out her small, frightened voice.

“What?”

“Norman,” she said. “He sounds funny. Not funny ha-ha, I mean. Funny like… weird. I peeked outside to make sure he’s staying warm in his doghouse, and… he’s making some really weird noises. Like he’s hurting.”

I stood. “What are you talking abou—”

“Listen. Can’t you hear him?”

I listened.

And I did hear him.

A low, keening whine from the backyard. It was faint beneath the roar of the storm. But it was there. The unmistakable sound of a living thing in great distress… or pain…

“That’s Norman?” I gasped. “My God—”

I ran for the rear of the house, my heart fluttering like a wounded bird in my chest. Sam followed closely behind me.

When I opened the back door, the storm ripped it from my grasp. The door banged against the house’s vinyl siding.

Thunder chuckled cruelly in the bruise-colored sky overhead.

At first, I could barely see Norman in the far corner of the yard. Sheets of pounding rain blurred the world before me. Miniature cascades of dirty run-off streamed from the roof of the retriever’s Bates Manor doghouse like thick gray curtains shielding him from sight. Only his glistening wet snout was visible, protruding from the doorway.

Norman’s agonized yowl had ceased for now, but in its place sick gagging noises reverberated about my property. The sound of violent retching. As if my dog were coughing up something lodged in his throat.

“Norman?” I called out to him, splashing through the pond that had been my backyard. “What’s wrong, boy?”

Behind me, Sam echoed my frantic cry. I glanced back at her as I approached Norman’s doghouse. Her long blonde hair was already plastered to her neck and shoulders. The rain trickled down her cheeks, dripped from her dimpled chin.

“Samantha, stay back,” I said. “I don’t want you to come any closer, okay?”

I knelt before the doghouse then, and beckoned to my best friend as the storm stung at the nape of my neck like a thousand angry bees trying to drive me back inside. “Norman? Norman, come here, boy…”

More awful gagging sounds. Like a beast fighting to breathe through a mouthful of razor blades.

“Come on, boy. Come on. It’s okay…”

Lightning lit up the world, brighter than the sunniest summer afternoon. A few seconds later, thunder boomed directly overhead, vibrating the ground beneath my feet.

My scalp tingled. The hair on my arms stood up. The storm’s electric fury seemed to hum inside of me, deep within my bones. I felt like a guitar string stretched taut, ready to snap any second.

“Norman,” I called again.

This time a long, rattling sigh resonated from the doghouse. Followed by a moist popping noise. Like something… giving way. Rupturing. The sound of spoiled fruit being stepped on and smeared across wet pavement.

I smelled sickness.

I covered my mouth and nose with one hand, held the other toward the crumpled black shape in the darkness of the doghouse.

“Norman, get out here,” I said, my voice cracking even as I tried to sound firm with him. “N-Now…”

Finally, beneath the storm’s incessant roar, I heard his collar jangle. A thump against the wooden walls of his home. A soft rustle of fur as he shifted inside there.

“That a boy. Come on. It’s okay…”

At last, Norman emerged through the doorway. The rain batted at his floppy golden ears, tattooing dime-sized indentions in his fur.

He took two steps toward me, his head hung low as if he had done something wrong, before his quivering legs betrayed him. With a hoarse wheeze, he collapsed into my arms.
“Oh, my God,” I wept, as I stared down at him. “Norman…?”
The retriever was shaking all over. His sides hitched in and out every few seconds. He peered up at me with eyes that were milky and rimmed with mucus. Thick yellowish foam bubbled from his mouth and nostrils, oozed down his muzzle and onto my wrists.

His tongue lolled out of one side of his mouth. It was an odd grayish-green color streaked with bright red blood.

Spasms wracked his body. From somewhere deep in his throat came a sound that was all at once a delirious growl, a terrified whimper, and a desperate sigh.

He gagged again.

And then he vomited into the mud at my feet.

Right away, I noticed the stuff he expelled from his stomach was bright, bright green. There was an odd chemical smell to it.

“No,” I cried. “God, no…”

Norman laid one limp paw upon my thigh, whined up at me as if pleading with his master to end his suffering.

He threw up again. All over my hands, this time. In my lap.

“This isn’t happening,” I wept, as I held my best friend’s twitching wet head in my hands. “It can’t be. Oh, n-no. No… Norman…”

I knew what was wrong with him. As much as I wished to deny it, I could not…

When I was eight or nine years old, I had a best friend whose dog was murdered by a mean old geezer down the block. The son of a bitch had used rat poison to do the evil deed, and my buddy’s beloved Jack Russell terrier, Jo-Jo, had displayed the exact symptoms my Norman was exhibiting now…

I remembered Jo-Jo’s vomit had been this same bright emerald hue.

I remembered how he had died in my best friend’s arms.

For those next few terrible seconds, I stared at Norman’s upturned food bowl several feet away. Something that had once been so innocent now seemed sinister, deadly. Like a gore-streaked machete or a smoking machine gun lying in the middle of my yard.

“Samantha!” I shouted. As I called for her, I buried my face in Norman’s sopping-wet fur, started rocking back and forth while the retriever convulsed in my embrace and I silently swore I would never let him go. “Samantha!”

“Daddy?” Sam cried. “Please tell me what’s going on. What’s wrong with Norman?”

“Call 911. Now.”

“D-Dad—”

“No, wait. Sam, wait.”

I held up one trembling hand. Trying to think. Trying to make sense of all this. Everything was happening too fast.

“Forget the police. Screw the police. They’re no good. Fucking worthless.” I turned to Sam, pushed my rain-soaked hair out of my eyes, and yelled to be heard above the storm, “I want you to go inside and find my address book. It’s in the top drawer of my computer desk. Look up Dr. Westerberg’s number. Hurry.”

“Who?”

“Dr. Westerberg. Norman’s vet. I need you to call him, sweetie. Tell him it’s an emergency. Can you do that?”

“I… yeah… s-sure. But… Daddy, please tell me what’s wrong with Norman!”

“Just do it, Sam. Do it now.”

“I’m scared.”

“Go, baby! Everything’s gonna be okay,” I lied.

She hurried inside, sobbing as she went. The door slammed shut behind her.

In my arms, Norman began to shudder more violently than ever. His head fell to one side, and more vomit rolled off of his slack gray tongue in wormy green rivulets. For the first time, I noticed that he appeared larger than usual. His belly was bloated to twice its normal size, as if the poison inside of him were some alien creature incubating within his guts.

“Oh, God,” I wept. “My dog. Norman! How could they…”

Norman convulsed in my embrace. He chuffed once, weakly. I squeezed him tighter to me, and his front legs kicked as if he were desperately trying to flee from his agony. He caught me in the crotch, hard, but I barely even noticed.

I felt dizzy, feared I might pass out face-down in the mud beside his traitorous food bowl as my senses were bombarded by the ozone scent of the storm, the musky odor of wet animal, and the sickly-sweet stench of impending death.

“God damn you!” I screamed, glaring up at the heavens as needles of frigid rain struck me in the face and stabbed into my Adam’s apple. “God damn you all!”

More flashes of angry lightning exploded all around me, as if the roiling black sky refused to allow me the last word. The storm gurgled and burped through the gutters over my shoulder, batted against the walls of my privacy fence in an unending basso drone.
And then, as I knelt there bawling like a baby, feeling so helpless and crippled with guilt, wondering what I could have done to prevent this… my best friend died in my arms.

His eyes filled with rain, but did not blink it away. They grew fixed, stared right through me.

I heard him lose control of his bowels.

His body went limp. His tail flopped once, as if with great effort, before lying still on the muddy ground in a shape like a crooked question mark.

The last thing poor Norman did before he left this world… was lick my right hand. Twice.

As if to say, Goodbye.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“I was thinking maybe Samantha shouldn’t come back over there until all of this is resolved,” Karen said. “Don’t you agree?”

We weren’t arguing. I knew she was right. But that didn’t make the conversation any easier.

“I mean… what if they decide to take it out on her, Andy? At this point, I wouldn’t put it past them. What if they hurt Sam?”

The phone line crackled and popped between us like the whispers of disembodied spirits eavesdropping on our conversation.

“Andy? Are you still there?”

“Just tell me that’s the only reason, Karen,” I said. “Tell me… tell me it’s because you’re worried about Sam, and promise me… promise me… that you don’t think there’s any truth to what my neighbors are saying…”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” my ex-wife replied. “I know you, Andy. Jesus. We’ve had our… problems… but I could never think anything like that. Ever.”

“Norman never hurt anybody,” I said.

“I know. He was a good dog.”

“I hope they burn in Hell for what they’ve done.”

“This is all gonna blow over,” Karen assured me. “Soon. It has to. The police will catch the killer in a few days, and these people will realize they’re gravely mistak—”

“That won’t bring Norman back,” I said, my voice cracking.

Karen sniffled softly on the other end of the line. “No. It won’t.”

“I’ve asked myself a million times if there’s anything I could have done differently,” I said. “If there might have been some way to save him, if I’d only found him sooner.”

“Andy, you can’t blame yourself. It’s not—”

“I caught them in the act the night they vandalized the Explorer. How in the hell did I not hear them in the middle of the fucking afternoon, when they were sneaking through the gate, slipping rat poison into his food bowl?”

“You know how friendly he was,” Karen said. “He probably never even barked once, if he knew the people who did this.”

“Oh, he knew them,” I said. “There’s no doubt in my mind.”

“I’m sorry, Andy. I’m so sorry. I know how much you loved that dog.”

A nervous twitch seized my body, and I nearly dropped the phone. I felt as if I had finally fallen off the precipice into insanity. And now there was no turning back.

“I hope you filed a police report,” Karen said.

“That’s not going to do any fucking good.”

“You should, Andy! At least then you’ll—”

“It’s the media’s fault,” I interrupted her. “You know that, don’t you? It’s all their fault. The newspaper. And the TV. They’re just as fucking guilty as the people who live on this street. They’ve convinced my neighbors that I’m something I’m not. And there isn’t a goddamn thing I can do about it.”

“What about libel? Maybe you could—”

“It’s not libel,” I said. “Everything they’ve printed about my books, my criminal record—it’s all true. So far, they haven’t lied about anything! You can’t sue if they’re reporting facts.”

“But the things they’re insinuating! I usually agree with his editorials, but did you see what that Jeremy Webster guy said in the last Indepe–”

“Insinuation isn’t grounds for a lawsuit either,” I said.

“What if… do you think it would help if you talked to them?”

“The press?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“But if they finally heard your side of the story, then they might—”

“I’m not going to let them twist my words, take them out of context. Because I know that’s what they’d do. It would only make things worse.”

Karen sighed, but did not reply. She knew I was right.

“The same goes for you,” I told her. “If they call you, wanting to ask questions about me, don’t tell the bastards anything.”

“I won’t.”

“Just say ‘no comment.’”

“I promise.”

“Thank you, Karen.”

“You don’t have to thank me, Andy. I’ll do whatever you think is best.”

“How is Sam handling this, by the way?” I said.

“Not well. She loved Norman too, you know.”

I quickly wiped away a tear that tickled its way down my cheek and caught in my five o’clock shadow.

Neither of us spoke for a long, awkward minute or two.

“Karen?” I said then.

“Hmm?”

“Do you remember that weekend we spent in the mountains? At Keene’s cabin?”

“Of course,” she replied, a wistful tone in her voice. “How could I forget?”

“I keep thinking about that weekend,” I said. “Of all the memories I have of poor Norman, I can’t get out of my mind what he did the last night we were up there…”

Norman had been a member of our family for a little less than a year on the evening in question. One late-summer afternoon, on a whim, we had decided to pack our things and embark on an unplanned vacation up in the Catskill Mountains in New York. Ever since I had known him, a fellow horror writer and good friend of mine had offered to let us use his summer cabin there; after damn near succumbing to mental burnout following a long period of penning two novels simultaneously, I finally accepted his invitation. We had taken Sam with us, of course, and Norman too, and as long as I live I shall never forget the night Karen and I sneaked out of the cabin like two horny, giggling teenagers. A few minutes after Samantha drifted off to sleep, we crept naked into the darkest part of the woods, where we spread out an old blanket on a carpet of pine needles, lit up a fat joint for the first time since our honeymoon, and proceeded to make the kind of passionate love usually reserved for young people naïvely innocent to the pitfalls of married life, fools who believe with all their hearts that nothing will ever tear them apart.

We began to make love, anyway, until our good buddy Norman came looking for us.

Just as we found our rhythm, our bodies merging as one, the retriever’s worried bark filled the night. So loud was his call, he woke Sam right away. We heard our daughter crying for us from the back porch of the cabin, and before we had a chance to compose ourselves Norman leapt out of the darkness, his sloppy wet tongue attacking our sweaty limbs with an urgency that could only have been borne from extreme jealousy. Like a big, ornery kid demanding every bit of our attention.

No matter how hard we tried, we were unable to stay angry with him. We laughed and laughed, wrapped ourselves in that dirty blanket and—our faces flush with embarrassment—we quickly followed Norman back to the cabin. Samantha’s tiny arms were crossed, I remember, and one foot tapped impatiently as she watched us emerge from the pitch-black night.

“God, I miss him,” I said into the phone now. “I miss him so bad.”

Karen did not reply.

Another long minute of silence passed between us. I stared at the crayon drawing Samantha had given me two months ago, that homemade HAPPY FATHER’S DAY card attached to the refrigerator door by teddy-bear magnets. Stick figure effigies of myself and Sam and a big brown Norman frolicked without a care in the world beneath an enormous bright yellow sun.

My vision grew blurry with tears until I could no longer see the picture at all.

I sniffled softly. Karen followed suit.

A few seconds later, in the background, I heard Jason Burke say something to my ex-wife that I couldn’t quite make out.

“You gotta go?” I said.

“Jason wants to, um, drive over to Pet World. He hasn’t told her yet, but he’s thinking about letting Sam pick out a puppy.”

I didn’t have the energy left in me to get pissed off about that. In some strange way, I even respected Jason for it. Despite the fact that my best friend’s corpse was barely even cold.

“I guess I should get going,” Karen said.

“I understand.”

“We’re probably going up to the lake again in a day or two, but I’ll have my cell-phone with me. Promise you’ll call if you need me?”

“I will,” I said.

“I’m serious, Andy. I’m worried about you.”

“Okay.”

“Please keep me updated?”

“Okay.”

“Take care of yourself.”

“I’ll try.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The evening was quiet, serene. Dusk had just begun to wrap its long gray arms around my property.

“What are you burying there, Andy?” Ben Souther called out to me as I huffed and puffed and salty sweat burned in my eyes.

I turned to see Ben peeking over the privacy fence separating our properties. The fence stood seven feet tall, but Ben kept a small stepladder on his side that he ascended any time we chatted back and forth while working in our respective backyards. As always, my next-door neighbor’s eyes were hidden behind his purple-tinted glasses—in fact, the brim of a floppy straw hat obscured the entire top half of his face on the evening in question—yet I could tell he was staring at the tarp-covered form on the ground behind me.

At first, I did not reply. I just returned to my task without saying a word. A few feet away, Norman’s doghouse lay on its side, empty and abandoned forever. Something about that depressed me even more than the shrouded, buzzing bulk at my feet. Never again would Norman curl up inside his miniature Bates Manor while he chewed on a plump chicken bone or drifted off into lazy canine slumber on a sunny afternoon.

I hadn’t decided yet what I planned to do with the doghouse, but where it had once sat in the far corner of my yard I now dug a hole in which to inter the retriever’s body. Before me, the results of my labor resembled a gaping brown wound in Mother Nature’s lush green flesh.

The ground was soft, still slightly muddy from yesterday’s rain, but that did not make my job any easier.

“Andy,” Ben said again.

I stopped digging, sighed. “What is it, Ben? I’m busy here.”

“Sorry to interrupt. I was just wondering what it is you’re burying there.”

My grip on the shovel’s handle grew tighter. Splinters dug into my callused palms.

Ben said, “That’s not… who I think it is—?”

His curious expression could not have been more fake. He knew. Whether he had played a part in Norman’s murder or not, he knew goddamn well what lay beneath the tarp.

I wanted to take my shovel to his head, knock that stupid fucking straw hat off and watch it go flying. I wanted to see his skull collapse beneath my wrath, consequences be damned.

Instead, I said, “It’s my dog.”

“Oh, man,” Ben said. “Man, that’s rough.”

“Someone poisoned him.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Wouldn’t joke about something like that, Ben.”

A cold breeze made the hair on my arms stand up. It caused the tarp covering Norman’s corpse to billow slightly. I imagined its invisible fingers caressing the retriever’s death-matted fur, tickling his floppy golden ears.

Ben continued to stare toward the shape on the lawn, as if he could not tear his eyes away from it. It infuriated me. This was a personal matter, a private good-bye between my best friend and me. I did not want anyone else to see this. My beloved pet’s makeshift funeral was none of Ben Souther’s fucking business, and Norman deserved so much more.

“For Christ’s sake,” I said. “Would you like me to lift up the tarp and show you, so you can see for yourself it’s really Norman under there?”

He frowned, shifted his weight from one foot to the other atop his little stepladder. “Whatever do you mean, Andy?”

“You know exactly what I mean, Ben. So you can tell all your friends”—I tilted my head in the direction of the street, toward the other houses on Poinsettia Lane—“that it’s not something else I’m burying in my backyard.”

Silence between us. Another strong breeze sighed through the treetops a few feet away. A dog barked in the distance.

For a second or two, I wondered if Ben was about to take me up on my offer. If he might jump across the fence to inspect the figure under the tarp for himself.

Finally, though, his face fell.

“Norman was a good dog,” he said. “I always liked him.”

“Me too,” I said.

“I’m sorry, Andy. If I knew who did it, I’d tell you. I think you deserve that, at least.”

“Would you, Ben?” I said. “Would you tell me?”

“Of course.”

“I’d like to believe that,” I said. “And I might have. Once upon a time.”

“You should ask Officer Keith to look into this for you. He’ll get to the bottom of it, I’m sure.”

I guffawed loudly, in spite of myself. “ ‘Officer Keith.’ Right.”

With that, I threw myself into my work anew, started digging like a madman. My shovel chuffed into the earth again and again and again. Harder, louder, faster. I wanted this over. Done with. Now.

As strenuously as I worked, however, I felt as if I moved in slow motion beneath my neighbor’s unending scrutiny.

“ ‘What is a man,’ ” Ben said softly, a few minutes later, “ ‘but a miserable little pile of secrets.’ ”

Once again I stopped digging, turned to my neighbor with eyes full of hate.

“What?”

“Andre Malraux,” he enlightened me.

This time I dropped my shovel. It made a soft pooting sound on the mound of dirt beside Norman’s grave. When I took several steps toward Ben, his face grew pale. He wobbled atop his stepladder, as if preparing to make a run for home.

“Ben,” I said. “How long have you known me now? Five, six years?”

“That sounds about right.”

“I'm not a killer.”

“Never said you were.”

I shook my head. I didn’t know what else to say. I just stood there staring at him.

“Man can hide a lot of secrets in five or six years, though,” Ben said. “You can’t blame folks for being suspicious. These are suspicious times, Andy. If you could step outside yourself, you’d see how it looks. What you did when you were young, and those books you write…”

He trailed off, as if he didn’t quite know how to finish his point. And then, the look Ben gave me during the next moment filled me with a sense of déjà vu the likes of which I had never felt before. It was so strong it gave me goosebumps…

When I was a child, I idolized my maternal grandfather. He was my role model, my hero. He was also extremely religious. Shortly after the publication of my first novel, I gave my grandfather a copy of that book. It had been such an honor to hand it to him, as he had always assured me that I could grow up to be anything I wanted to be as long as I worked hard at it. My greatest dream back then was to make my grandfather proud. At first, it appeared I had succeeded. He beamed from ear to ear as he asked me to sign it for him, said he couldn’t wait to read it. He told all his friends about it, and the fellow members of his Seventh Day Adventist church. But one week later, he handed the book back to me. He claimed he had tried to read it, but after discovering that my novel was filled with “such flagrant ungodliness” he could never accept my gift in good conscience. I’ll never forget the look on my grandfather’s face as he told me this. It was an expression of sheer disappointment, as if he had lost so much respect for me. Respect I could never earn back.

It was that same look of not-so-subtle condescension and disappointment that darkened Ben Souther’s face now as he peered over my privacy fence, watching me bury my best friend. An expression of loss, almost. Hurt. As if he were the one who had suffered so much these past few days. As if I had brought all of this upon myself, and in the process Ben had lost a damned good friend who turned out to be anything but good and very damned indeed.

I stared at the pink evening sky.

I felt tired. So tired.

I reached for my shovel again.

“I’m a writer, Ben,” I said. “That’s all. I am just a writer.”

I realized I had started crying. Tears of both grief and anger burned in my eyes. They trickled down my face and dripped into the mud at my feet.

Ben said, “But you write about death. The occult. In your stories people are always hurting other people. Usually the innocent.”

“Have you ever read any of my books?” I asked him. “Or are you just talking out of your ass?”

“Touché.”

“Besides, that’s what they do, isn’t it? Every day. People hurt other people.”

“Mm,” Ben said. “Unfortunately, you are right…”

He paused, as if for effect.

“But then: ‘Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.’ ”

I glared at him.

For once, he did not identify the source of his quotation.

Fueled by wrath, I threw myself into my work more vigorously than ever. My shovel stabbed into the earth like a knife gouging into the flesh of my enemies. I stood upon its blade, forcing it deeper, deeper. Digging faster and faster. My breaths burst out of me in harsh, labored grunts, and I began slinging the dirt from Norman’s grave haphazardly over my shoulder. I was no longer aiming for the mound a few feet away.

“I guess you’ve never heard about what happened to the Beechams,” Ben said. “Hard to believe, but you must be one of the only folks around here who doesn’t know…”

I did not respond. I just kept digging. As if my life depended on it.

“If nothing else, maybe it’ll help put things into perspective for you. Maybe then you’ll understand that there’s more to this tragedy than you think. Folks aren’t just picking on you, Andy. They’re not just looking for a scapegoat. They’re searching for justice.”

Still, I continued digging.

“Thirty years ago, Floyd and his wife had a daughter. Their only child. Her name was Carolyn. This was when they lived up in Philly, long before I ever knew them. Carolyn was six, I believe, the last time they saw her. She was abducted at the mall while the Beechams were Christmas shopping.”

I paused. Tried not to let Ben know that he had struck a nerve. Wondered if, in his own way, he was trying to tell me who had poisoned my dog.

I quickly went back to digging.

“They never found her, Andy. It was as if their little girl just vanished without a trace. All these years, the Beechams have never known what happened to their daughter. Floyd told me it damn near drove Frannie crazy.”

Finally, I stopped. I stared at him.

He stared back.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. And I meant it.

Ben said, “None of us can imagine what those poor people went through. You can’t unless you’ve been there. Unless you’ve walked in their shoes.”

“I’m sure Rebecca Lanning’s murder brought back a lot of terrible memories for the Beechams,” I said. “And you’re right. That does explain a lot. But let me tell you something, Ben…”

“Yeah?”

“I just want you to know, and you should spread the word to your buddies… if I catch any of them on my property again, I don’t care who it is… I swear to God I’ll kill them.”

Ben gasped. “What a horrible thing to say.”

“I mean it.”

“Bad times in our neighborhood, son. I don’t know if I’d go around saying stuff like that. Might not help your situation much, you get my drift.”

Behind him, the crackle and buzz of an electric bug zapper on Ben’s rear patio punctuated his warning as its lethal blue glow claimed a victim.

I shook my head, gnashed my teeth so hard I heard them squeaking in my skull, and returned to my digging once again. Because I knew if I gazed upon Ben Souther for another second I would no longer be able to restrain myself from leaping over the fence and strangling him with my bare hands.

About the time I finished, when I tossed my shovel aside and reached for the tarp to commence with the most difficult part of my task, the older man cleared his throat.

“I have always liked you, Andy,” he said softly. “So I just want to warn you…”

I bent over Norman’s corpse, did not look at Ben as I growled, “Warn me about what?”

“Maybe you should just leave. That might be best. Before things get even worse.”

A chill shot up my spine. My best friend’s vinyl burial shroud slid from my grasp with a rubbery squeak.

“Are you threatening me? How dare you—”

“No. No. Not at all. I’m just giving you a friendly bit of advice, man to man…”

In the twilight, my neighbor’s dark glasses resembled two wide black holes in his face. Like twin gunshot wounds to his skull.

“Cut your losses, Andy. Pack up your things and go.”

At last, he turned and descended his stepladder. However, his parting words seemed to linger on the evening air like a foul stench long after Ben disappeared from sight.

“Get out while you still can. Before you end up dead, just like your mutt.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

That night, I dreamed I was digging another grave.

But this time I buried my daughter.

The site of her interment was the Clinton property, down the street. All around me, wide yellow CRIME SCENE: DO NOT CROSS streamers snapped and popped in a chilly breeze while I worked. The night was starless, moonless. Blacker than the Devil’s soul.

I didn’t wake up screaming until shortly after the pink Bugs Bunny beach towel covering my little girl’s corpse slid away, and she sat up with a sound like autumn leaves crackling underfoot.

She was naked.

She turned to me, opened her eyes.

She had no pupils. Just two blank, unholy orbs that burned a bright, bright green. The same color as the poison that killed my golden retriever.

“Why did you let Norman die?” said the nightmare Samantha-thing, beckoning to me with mottled gray arms too long and skinny to be her own. “Daddy, what did you dooooo?”

In the distance, a dog barked. It was an angry, accusing sound… yet eerily distorted, like a scratchy old record playing in reverse.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Three days later—mere seconds after I had finished gobbling down a tuna salad sandwich and a glass of flat Dr Pepper for dinner—my cell phone rang.

I considered letting it go straight to voice-mail, but I knew I would never forgive myself if I found out later that Sam had tried to call me.

I wasn’t thinking straight. My mind barely registered the words “UNKNOWN NUMBER” on the little screen. As I carried my dirty dishes to the kitchen sink, I punched a button and grumbled into the phone, “Hello.”

“Andrew Holland.” A man’s voice. Low, muffled. As if he were covering the receiver with something so I could not identify him.

It worked. I detected a slight Southern accent, but nothing more.

“Speaking,” I said. “Who is this?”

“You’re fucked, Holland. It won’t be long at all now…”

“Excuse me? Who—”

“Might wanna turn on the TV. Your book-writin’ ass is finished.”

My breath caught in my throat. “What? I don’t understa—”

“Go ahead and play dumb, horror man.”

“How the hell did you get this number?”

“Hope you enjoyed your sick little game while it lasted. ’Cause we’ve got a real scary story to tell you.”

“Look,” I shouted into the phone. “I don’t know who the hell you are, or what the hell is going on, but I’ve had all I’m gonna take of this shit! I want it to stop right now!”

His voice dropped to a lecherous whisper, so low it was nearly inaudible. “Halloween’s comin’ early this year, Short Eyes. Wait and see.”

He hung up before I could say anything else.

With a wild-animal roar, I threw the cell across the room, where it shattered against the refrigerator in an explosion of shiny black plastic.

***

Against my better judgment, I turned on the television as soon as I entered the living room. I had to know what the voice on the phone had been talking about…

I didn’t watch for long. I couldn’t. After just three or four minutes I turned the TV off again in disgust, and the remote control suffered the same fate as my cell phone.

On the television, a middle-aged man in a beige suit stood on a street corner in front of a white-brick building that I thought looked vaguely familiar. From off-camera, swirling red and blue police beacons flashed like psychedelic strobe lights across his surroundings; reflected in his wire-rimmed glasses, obscuring his eyes every half-second or so. In the background, a siren whooped. A stern-voiced woman yelled, “Get back! I mean it! I’m not gonna tell you again!”

The microphone in the reporter’s hand was labeled WKLS. Beneath him, a bold white caption at the bottom of the screen read: LIVE!

“Investigators have cordoned off the scene for the time being, so we can’t get any closer,” the man on the television was saying. “For those who are just tuning in, another child’s body was found this evening in a dumpster behind Sunrise Plaza, on Orosel Boulevard. Though police have not released the decedent’s name, one source who asked to remain anonymous stated that the child was a female between the age of five and seven years old. Foul play is suspected, but authorities declined to comment on the cause of the victim’s death or on any possible connection to the recent Rebecca Lanning murder.

“Residents of Harrison County will recognize Sunrise Plaza as the home of, among other businesses, the Haunted Planet Book Shoppe. The Haunted Planet, which you see behind me, sits less than two hundred feet from where this latest victim’s body was found. The Haunted Planet is a bookstore specializing in the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. During the last five years, the store has hosted several successful book-signing events for local writer Andrew Holland, author of the best-selling horror novels Wolf Moon, Slow Burn, and House on Harding Street. In a bizarre coincidence, it was Holland who, just three weeks ago, discovered the body of nine-year-old Rebecca Lanning on a construction site not far from his home. No arrests have been made in that investigation, but Andrew Holland’s neighbors are demanding his silence be broken…

“With that,” the reporter concluded, “I turn things over to Staci Gayle-Mathis, who has been covering another side of the Rebecca Lanning story. Staci is also live just several miles from here. Staci?”

The scene cut to a different one then. A female reporter, this time.

“Thank you, Rich,” she said. She was bathed in the bright glow of a news-camera’s light splitting apart the gathering dusk. She walked backward as she spoke into her microphone, her gait confident and effortless even in her high heels. Her hair was very curly, the kind of blond that came only in a bottle. She wore a pink ribbon pinned to the lapel of her burgundy dress—in memory of Rebecca Lanning, I assumed, and I wondered if she had purchased it down the road at Round Man Miller’s 7th Avenue Stop-N-Shop.

The word LIVE! continued to blink at the bottom of the screen.

It only took me a second or two to figure out where this footage was being filmed. Where it was being filmed this very second…

“Oh, no,” I said. My voice was a pitiful squeak. “Oh, no…”

Staci Gayle-Mathis stood in the middle of Poinsettia Lane, directly in front of my house.

The camera’s eye wandered from her photogenic features just long enough to zoom in on my home.

The person behind the camera must have lain down in the road for the next few seconds, I assumed, as he or she perfectly captured during that moment a worm’s-eye view of my house. The intended result was effective, I had to admit. From this angle, 217 Poinsettia Lane no longer resembled the quiet domicile of a divorced father who just wanted to be left alone to write his books and pay his bills… now it had transformed into the sinister lair of someone who was surely up to no good in there. It reminded me of every generic cover to every generic haunted-house novel I had ever read (or written).

Its windows were like eyes, leering out at a world it loathed and wanted to murder bit by bit.

Even when the cameraman rose again, pulling back to a shot of Staci Gayle-Mathis standing in the foreground, my house slightly above and behind her, my goosebumps did not fade. There was something so surreal, dream-like, about viewing my house from a different angle at the exact moment I sat inside. It seemed strangely unfamiliar, like a place where I had once experienced a handful of pleasant memories but it had never truly been home.

I could even see the flickering blue glow of a television through the drawn white curtains, and I was quite sure I even glimpsed a fuzzy gray humanoid shape—my own silhouette?—hunched inside there as well. That gave me a weird primal chill, as if I suddenly possessed the power to be in two places at once. As if I had stepped outside of my body to view myself from afar.

I shuddered, listened to what the reporter had to say although I did not want to. Half of it I had already missed, thanks to a high-pitched buzzing that filled my skull and made my teeth ache.

“. . . meanwhile, the novelist’s neighbors are furious over what they consider a clear case of the Harris City Police Department ‘dragging its feet,’ if you will. Many on this formerly peaceful street claim that the authorities have blatantly neglected to do their job. I spoke with several Poinsettia Lane residents here tonight, and I could feel the anger and sense of sheer hopelessness that weighs upon the hearts of each of these people—many of whom are parents themselves—in the wake of this terrible, ongoing nightmare. Here is an example of a neighborhood shaken to its core, a community that is no longer sure who it can trust, as nearby lurks a man who not only makes his living creating tales of murder and madness, but who, in February ——, pled guilty to—”

That’s when I turned off the television.

I couldn’t take anymore.

When would it end, this carnival of madness? When would the vultures decide that enough was enough?

I hated Staci Gayle-Mathis with every fiber of my being. She was the enemy. She represented every yellow journalist who had caused all of my problems in the first place, with her endless insinuations and irresponsible, sensationalistic approach to Rebecca Lanning’s story. And now the bitch was digging my grave even deeper.

I wished I could snap my fingers and make her disappear… make it all disappear…

Strangely enough, at the same time, some small part of me didn’t want her to leave. As much as I despised her, and prayed this harassment would end, I did not want to be alone. Not tonight. I did not want her to wrap up her “story” and move elsewhere.

Because somehow, with the all-seeing eye of the news camera stationed in front of my home, there was an inexplicable feeling of safety along with its intrusiveness. A merciful delay of the inevitable…

But once the street grew silent once again… when the thick, black night encroached upon my property…

. . . then, I knew, I would be vulnerable.

Another little girl had fallen prey to a predator of the worst kind. A mother and father were left behind to mourn this most unimaginable loss. I did sympathize with them. But at that moment, I could only focus on what this latest development meant to my already hopeless situation.

After every vile act my neighbors had perpetrated against me the last two weeks, fueled by their idiotic prejudices and misguided preconceptions, I realized none of it compared to what was about to happen.

I held my head in my hands. My lips moved soundlessly, as a taunting voice sang loud and off-key in the back of my mind, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet…”

God help me, I did not want to be alone with my neighbors.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

That night, as I had feared, they came for me.

All of them.

Before it was over, every one of us would have blood on our hands.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

“Hollaaaaaaaaaaaand!” someone shouted at the top of his lungs.

I flinched.

It came from outside, a primal war-cry that seemed to fill the entire neighborhood. It might have come from Ben Souther, but I couldn’t be sure.

“HOLLAAAAAAAAND!!!” Louder this time, and filled with even more rage than the first.

A cold chill caressed my body. My chair clattered to the floor as I rose from the kitchen table, where I had been sitting for hours with my head in my hands.

According to the clock on the microwave, the time was 7:54 p.m.

“Jesus Christ, what now?” I cursed.

I lurched to the front of the house. Wondered what I would find on my lawn this time. Perhaps my neighbors had armed themselves with guns, and the second I stepped outside they would cut me in half right there on my welcome mat… or maybe they planned to throw an old-fashioned lynch party with me as the guest of honor… perhaps they were preparing even now to burn my house to the ground, as I thrashed about inside, doomed to roast alive…

Slowly, I gripped the doorknob. I took a deep breath, held it in. I did not want to answer their call, but when it came again I knew I had no choice.

“Holland! Get your ass out here right now!”

I eased open the door. Stepped out onto the porch.

My blood turned to ice in my veins.

In my yard, beneath a late-evening sky the fiery hue of peaches ripe for picking, stood nine or ten of my closest neighbors, glaring up at me with murder in their eyes.

And there were twice as many still on the way.

Like zombies in a bad B-movie, they shambled toward me from all sides. Crossing their own lawns and driveways one by one, marching down Poinsettia Lane through the dusk to surround my property en masse.

“What the hell do you want?” I shouted at them. “Haven’t you done enough?”

Ben Souther was out there, standing in the middle of my lawn. So was his wife, Marianne. To their immediate left stood Gabe and Valerie Pearson, to their right Joe and Eileen Tuttle. On the hood of my ruined SUV sat Floyd and Francine Beecham, and nearby were their good friends Ned and Mitzi Pastorek. Just now arriving were the Tomblins, Ernie and Suzanne, as well as Steve and Ginger Heatherly. Chad and Kimberly Rickman followed close behind, walking hand in hand as if they were enjoying a leisurely late-day stroll together. A few seconds later, Donna Dunaway waddled over to stand in one corner of my yard, her huge pregnant belly leading the way.

And still more of them came. More. Filling up my yard with every passing second…

Sal Friedman. Keith Whitmire. Todd and Patty Carstensen. Freddy Morgan. Drew and JoLynn Pruitt. Lorne Childress. Hank and Bethany Glover. Glenn and Charlene Sommersville.

Even sweet old Mona Purfield soon made an appearance, her Siamese cat Miss Pretty slinking along in her shadow.

Most of them were fully dressed, but others approached my house in their pajamas, nightshirts, and bathrobes. They came with bare feet, and in grass-stained knee-high socks or fuzzy bedroom slippers. Two or three of the women wore curlers in their hair, and somewhere in the crowd I might have even glimpsed a thick green mud-mask glowering up at me like something long dead but still blinking.

It was as if every last resident of Poinsettia Lane had dropped whatever he or she was doing to answer some satanic higher call…

If the hateful gathering on my lawn had not been enough to set my heart fluttering, it was what they brought with them that conjured a frigid rash of goosebumps over every inch of my body. In their hands, my neighbors gripped ordinary household tools and utensils that—under different circumstances—would have been anything but threatening. Here, though, now, those mundane items were brandished with a deadly purpose. And God help me, I knew what they were for…

Baseball bats… bicycle chains… sledgehammers… tire irons… crowbars… rusty steel pipes… fireplace pokers… golf clubs… even shiny metal meat mallets crusted with the pinkish ingredients of recent meals.

At the rear of the mob, Freddy Morgan wielded a vicious-looking length of wood—a cedar two-by four from which jutted three long silver nails—and I knew instantly where it had come from. He had ripped it from his fancy new deck across the street, improvising for the task at hand.

“Get the hell off my property,” I told them.

My voice came out as little more than a whiny croak. So I said it again.

“Get the hell off my property. Now.”

“Not until we discuss a few things, Andy,” Ben Souther said from the center of the throng. He wrapped one arm around his wife, pulled her close. “We need to talk about your horror books, and what they’ve done to this neighborhood.”

“What they’ve done—?” A mad titter slipped from between my lips. “Don’t you hear what you’re saying? Do you know how ridiculous you sound?”

“Look at him… laughing!” Mona Purfield pointed her cast-iron skillet at me, as Miss Pretty rubbed up against her varicose-veined legs. “Two children are dead now, Andy Holland. This is hardly a laughing matter.”

Murmurs of agreement rose up from the crowd.

“Poinsettia Lane used to be a good place to live.” Floyd Beecham climbed down from the hood of my Explorer. He wore a faded Green Bay Packers tank top and wrinkled gray pajama bottoms at least a size too large for his skinny frame. A wide leather strop dangled from his hand like something obscene as he moved across the yard to stand by Ben. “Ain’t gonna be that way again till we get rid of the likes of you.”

“The police got their heads up their asses,” said Ned Pastorek. “Just ’cause you’re some kinda big-shot ‘celebrity,’ they let you walk around free as a bir—”

“Not all of us, Ned,” said Keith Whitmire, stepping from the shadows at the far corner of my yard where my property met the Sommersvilles’. He was still in full uniform, but his shirt hung open, unbuttoned, exposing the hairiest chest I had ever seen. He carried a bottle of Michelob Light in one hand. In his other: a shiny black nightstick.

Pastorek nodded the cop’s way. “Right. Thank the good Lord we’ve got you in our corner, Keith.” He turned back to me. “This has gone too far, Holland. It’s time you paid the piper.”

“It’s just us and you now, boy,” said Floyd Beecham. “Nobody here to save your sorry ass.”

He walked across the lawn, but stopped at the foot of my steps.

“What do you gotta say for yourself now?”

My mouth hung open. I shook my head back and forth, unable to believe what I was hearing. “You’re all insane. You… you’ve lost your fucking minds.”

“We ain’t the ones writin’ books about the Devil,” Valerie Pearson said, in that thick Southern Belle accent of hers I had once upon a time found so sexy.

Her husband Gabe finished for her, “Stories about people eatin’ other people, and kids turnin’ into demons!”

“What kind of a psycho makes up stuff like that?” pondered Patty Carstensen.

“ ‘Every artist dips his brush in his own soul,’ ” Ben Souther said, as if in answer to her question, “ ‘and paints his own nature into his pictures.’ ”

I glared at my neighbors.

They glared back.

No one moved.

“I tried to warn you, Andy,” Ben said then. Softly. With a tone of sincere regret. “I told you, you should just pack up your things and leave. But you wouldn’t listen.”

“Ben,” I said, “For God’s sake… why don’t you tell them? Tell them they’re talking crazy. You know I could never—”

“It’s much too late for that, don’t you think?”

“You people wrecked my car,” I said. “You killed my dog. What else do you want from me?”

They did not reply. They just stood there glaring at me, the last weak rays of the day’s setting sun tinting their flesh an eerie amber color. Their shadows stretched slowly across my lawn.

“Whitmire!” I shouted at the burly cop in the middle of the mob. “What about you, man? Do something. Are you gonna let them get away with threatening me like this?”

Officer Keith said nothing. A smug grin stretched across his stubbled face. He used the end of his billy club to scratch at an itchy spot near his left nipple. Then he crossed his arms, shrugged.

I’m off the clock, the bastard’s expression seemed to say.

“Fuck you, then. Prick.” I turned to head back inside. “I’m calling the real police.”

But I hesitated a second too long. My neighbors did not disperse as I expected.

They called my bluff.

The mob suddenly surged forward.

I fumbled with the storm door, fighting to get it open. Their footsteps made snake-like hissing noises in the grass as they surrounded my porch.

“Stop,” I said, holding one hand out toward my neighbors in a placating gesture. “Dammit, wait—”

They raised their weapons in the air.

“Eat shit, dirtbag!” barked a gruff male voice.

And that was when someone threw the beer bottle at me.

I never saw it coming. It shattered when it struck my forehead.

The world went fuzzy. Blood filled my eyes. For those next few seconds, that high-pitched crash of breaking glass rang through my skull like a sustained note of agony drowning out everything else.

“Agh, God…”

The porch tilted vertically beneath my feet. I held both hands to my leaking scalp, fell to one knee.

“Take that, Short Eyes!” Floyd Beecham’s voice came at me from somewhere beyond my veil of pain.

I stood, faltered, nearly fell again as more bottles flew my way in a brutal barrage of colored glass.

A liquor bottle bounced off my chest with a hollow thonk. Another exploded at my feet. An antique Coca-Cola bottle zipped past my left ear, busted against the house.

“Dance, boy, dance!” cackled Sal Friedman from within that tornado of hatred seething on my lawn.

A few seconds later, a hail of heavy gray stones joined their storm of bottles, pelting my flesh from every direction.

I felt one thud into my crotch, but I barely had time to react before another lanced across my right temple. I shielded my face with both hands, but that did not help at all. Another rock struck my shin… my stomach… my collarbone… like furious, rapid-fire stings from a swarm of giant wasps.

A fat red chunk of brick missed my head by only an inch or two. It shattered the glass of my storm door, and the crowd cheered as if whoever had thrown it had accomplished some monumental feat.

“Jesus!” I cried as another brick slammed into my stomach.

I whirled around, staggered for the door, jerked it open as more bottles, rocks, and bricks pounded against my spine and buttocks.

Finally, I dragged myself inside. Slammed the door. Locked it.

Hot blood gushed into my eyes. I wiped it away with the back of one hand, but immediately a fresh river of gore trickled down from the gash on my forehead like crimson saliva from a drooling demon’s mouth.

“Jesus…”

I knew I needed stitches. But that was not an option for me at the moment.

All over my body, a million cuts and bruises sang out for medical attention as I limped into the kitchen.

My heart sank. The pieces of my shattered cell lay in front of the refrigerator, where I had hurled the phone earlier that evening. It was destroyed.

“Fuck!” I shouted. Then my voice cracked as I recalled, “There’s still the land-line.”

Gripped with panic, I ran into the bedroom. Fell to my knees in front of the old rotary phone on the nightstand.

As I brought the receiver to my ear, a prayer fell from my lips. The dial tone was the sweetest sound I had ever heard.

But a second later, it ceased. Like the pulse of a murder victim abruptly cut short.

“No. No!”

My neighbors were a step ahead of me. I shouldn’t have been surprised.

They had cut the phone line.

A second later, the lights went out.

I was trapped. A prisoner in my own home.

Outside, more bottles and rocks and God-knew-what-else thundered against the house’s façade… the sound of my sanity crumbling bit by bit.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

A pounding at the front door, shortly after midnight. Faces at every window.

“We see you in there, Short Eyes!” Floyd Beecham shouted. “You’re only prolonging the inevitable!”

A smattering of applause and cheers of agreement echoed through the night.

“We’re comin’ for you, pervert!” That sounded like Valerie Pearson.

Their pounding grew louder. They no longer pummeled the house with rocks and bricks; from the sound of it, my neighbors were now beating at the doors and windows with their fists and palms, in an almost tribal sort of rhythm. It started at the front door now, moved to the side of the house, then around to the back.

They were tireless. It continued for hours. Never letting up.

***

“Fuck this,” I heard a male voice exclaim shortly after two in the morning.

It was their pet cop. Keith Whitmire.

“What are you gonna do?” another man asked him.

“I’m tired of waiting. I’m going in.”

A woman squealed, “Woohoo!”

“Save some for me, Keith!”

“Sorry, Ned. Can’t make no promises.”

Drunken laughter. Cheers.

A new cacophony of thuds, thumps, crashes and booms reverberated all around me then, louder than ever. Like the sounds of war, right here on a once-quiet suburban street in middle America. It made me think of a crowd at some intense sporting event, a multitude riled-up to the point of no return, stomping their feet and making as much noise as humanly possible.

I had to protect myself. They were coming for me. I had to do something now…

I ran into the kitchen, turned on the stove, the MagLite leading my way.

Somewhere toward the front of the house, glass shattered.

I grabbed a pan out of the cabinet, slammed it down on the stove.

“I’ll show you,” I mumbled as I worked. “I’ll fucking show you!”

I found a box of matches. Lit the gas stove with hands that shook like those of a man twice my age. My scalp throbbed, but it was a dull ache now. The least of my worries.

I flung open a cabinet door, found a fat bottle of vegetable oil. There wasn’t much left in the bottle, but I poured it all into the pan.

“What’s he doing in there?” I heard Mona Purfield ask from the back step. It sounded as if she were right there in the room with me.

Another crash from the front of the house. More breaking glass.

“Fuck!” I cursed, running to see what had caused it.

Like some dark creature stepping out of a nightmare into the real world, Keith Whitmire was making his way into my home through the shattered living room window. He moved slowly, so as not to cut himself on the broken glass, but he was inside. Almost.

I just stood there staring at him in disbelief for a moment. Then I snapped out of it.

Behind me, the oil on the stove cracked and popped.

I ran to the kitchen, grabbed the pan. Rushed back down the hallway with it.

“What’s going on in there?” Floyd Beecham called to Keith. “Talk to us, man!”

“I’ve got him!” Whitmire yelled back at Floyd. When he spotted me standing a few feet away, he pointed a finger at me and growled, “End of the line, Holland. Nowhere to run.” His eyes were wild, his teeth bared like those of a wild animal.

His hand went to the gun on his hip.

I took two steps forward, shined my flashlight’s beam into his face, and swung the pan of hot oil at him.

It made a grotesque sizzling sound as it splashed across his flesh.

He fell back out of the window, onto the porch, and his screams filled the night.

“What happened?” Donna Dunaway cried. “Oh, my God, what happened?”

“Burned me! Gaaa! Son of a bitch burned me!”

“Holland!” Donna shrieked at me through the shattered window. “You monster!”

“Jesus, it hurts! It hurts!”

“Bastard got the drop on Keith,” said Floyd Beecham. “Shit! I think there might be somebody else in there with him!”

I smiled evilly, and quickly backed out of the living room, into the shadows of the hallway.

“What do we do now?” I heard Gabe Pearson ask. “Keith needs medical attention.”

“Should I drive him to the emergency room?” asked Sal Friedman.

Ben Souther’s voice: “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Then what do we do?”

“Lorne, Freddy, you two help him over to McFarland’s place. Phil should be able to fix him up.”

“Where is the doc?”

“Last time I saw him, he was watching the street. Let’s put Ernie on that for now. Tell the doc to head home for a few hours, and take good care of our man.”

Floyd Beecham interjected: “But, Ben… McFarland’s not that kind of doctor. Don’t he work on lady parts for a livin’?”

“You got a better idea, Floyd? He’ll have to do for now.”

“Gotcha.”

“It’s not a problem, my friend. We’re merely forced to improvise. ‘The only rigidity lies in our will, our conviction that we are on the right road and that our initiatives are most pressing.' ”

“Okay.”

“Well, I say Holland’s gone too far,” said Joe Tuttle. “He’s taunting us now. Laughing at us! We oughta wrap this shit up for good.”

Floyd said, “I’m with Joe. We should storm the place. Bring him out in pieces, if we have to. He can’t hold off every one of us.”

“No,” said Ben. “We’re not gonna do that. For now, we wait. Who knows what else he’s got up his sleeve? We don’t want anyone else getting hurt. He has to come out eventually. And when he does, we’ll be here.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Night turned into morning.

Nothing changed.

As the hours ticked by, my mind reeled with so many conflicting emotions—a torrent of wrath, sorrow, loss, regret, pain, terror, and everything in between. I felt smothered beneath an overwhelming sense of restlessness, an urgent desire to do something—anything—to get myself out of this. I wondered if I should just make a run for it, tried to calculate how hard it would be for my captors to hit a moving target. At least a million times over the next twelve hours, I asked myself why I had never owned a gun. How did I ever expect to wade through the sea of malevolence that engulfed my property, to fight my way to freedom armed with nothing but my own bruised and bloody fists?

So far, my neighbors had merely played a sick game of intimidation with me. They had destroyed my property, shattered my spirit. But after my attack with the hot oil they had shown no second effort to break inside. It was as if they were biding their time, toying with me. Or maybe… had I actually frightened them? They couldn’t be afraid of one man, could they? Then again, I wouldn’t have thought it possible that they would take things this far to begin with. When they were ready to end this, I knew they would win. I would fight for as long as I could, but I knew I would be helpless to stop them when they at last decided to finish their sick game. What did have? Nothing. I was out of oil. And although it saved me at the time, I feared that my attack with the oil—especially on a man like Keith Whitmire—had only served to throw gasoline on a fire that was already raging out of control. Now I had only my stupid spear. I was so tired, my brain so fried with a cocktail of panic and depression that I barely remembered making it. At some point I had apparently gotten creative, constructing the weapon out of a big butcher knife duct-taped to the end of a broken mop-handle. Now it looked silly in my hands. Like a child’s toy that would barely make a dent in someone if put to the test. But I held on to it harder than I had ever held on to anything in my life.

When, I wondered, would I be forced—like the victims in the horror films that were my lifelong addiction—to board up my doors and windows in order to keep the beasts at bay? How long until a tangled mass of sweaty, moon-pale arms burst through, ripping at my clothes and hair like reanimated corpses clambering for fresh brains? How long until they tore me limb from limb?

It would have been so easy to just give up. To throw open my front door and surrender to their murderous embrace. I envisioned my broken body passing over that sea of scowling faces like a crowd surfer at a heavy metal concert, imagined what they would do with my head if I finally let them have it…

It was so damn tempting. At least then this would all be over…

At some point early in the morning, eight or nine hours after they had first surrounded my home, I succumbed to my fatigue despite fighting sleep with every trace of energy left in me. Shortly after changing the dressing on my lacerated scalp one last time, gulping down a handful of Tylenol, I nodded off for a minute or two right there on the bathroom floor, and I dreamed that my neighbors had busted inside my home at last… they filled the house to capacity, and I lay crushed amongst them like a helpless minnow surrounded by a thousand ravenous sharks. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. Their teeth were made of shiny silver nails in my nightmare, and the unified alien war-cry that issued from their mouths as they descended upon me was not unlike the hoarse, dying whine of my best friend on the day they took his life.

After that, I did not allow myself to fall asleep again. Sleep was not an option. Sleep could be the death of me.

Every second of the night and into the following morning, I could still hear them outside. Even when their racket tapered off a bit, the thumping and banging fading to sporadic bursts of malicious laughter, it never died completely. Wood cracked, splintered, popped and whined as they vandalized my front porch, as if they planned to tear the house to the ground one piece at a time. Glass shattered in my driveway every few minutes. Constant profanities were hurled my way, vehement curses far more offensive than any I had ever used in my books the bastards rushed to condemn. Once I was sure I heard Dr. Tom McFarland’s normally cultured, effeminate voice boasting from atop my house, “I’m going to bounce this hammer off his goddamn skull, I get half a chance… just you wait and see”; I assumed he was all done tending to Whitmire’s injuries, and had returned to the game thirsty for blood, ready to make up for lost time. An awful metallic clatter echoed up and down the street, the resounding din of the mob finishing off my already destroyed Explorer with their crowbars, baseball bats, and jagged two-by-fours. On more than one occasion I attempted to drown out my neighbors’ fury by cranking up the stereo in my office, blasting my old Black Sabbath, AC/DC, and Blue Oyster Cult CDs at maximum volume. But none of it did any good.

On and on, it went. On and on…

My property had become nothing less than a battlefield. Suburban apocalypse. These were the sounds of war all around me. But in this war, every one of the participants loved what he was doing. They reveled in it.

Just before dawn I heard the puttering growl of a chainsaw start up in my backyard. My heart pounded painfully in my chest as I gripped my trusty Maglite in one hand and my makeshift spear in the other—I barely recognized my own reflection in the butcher knife’s blade, a twitchy, wild-eyed stranger with an ugly smear of crusty brown gore at his hairline—and I lay prone in the middle of the hallway waiting to see the saw’s vicious razor-teeth come chewing through the back door. Although that never happened, I could hear them cutting up something back there. Raucous laughter ripped apart the night, louder even than the grating buzz of the saw. I strongly suspected it might have been Norman’s doghouse which fell prey to their lunacy—a terrible thought that sent tears of both overwhelming sadness and murderous rage streaming down my face—but I did not dare peek out the window above the kitchen sink to be sure.

I did not want to see.

I did not want to know what they were doing out there.

“God help me,” I wept.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

A few minutes after eight a.m., twelve hours into my captivity, help finally arrived.

At least for a little while.

I thought I was hearing things at first. Chalked it up to nothing more than an auditory hallucination induced by chronic wishful thinking. The drug-like funk of sleep deprivation married with my throbbing head wound filled my skull with a grating buzz louder even than the destruction outside.

During the first few hours of my ordeal, I had hoped Detectives Norton and Hembry might come visiting. I assumed they would want a word with me soon, about that second child’s body. By mid-morning, if I could only hold out that long, surely I would hear car doors slamming, would hear the detectives chasing the mob off my lawn. I longed to see Norton’s smug, condescending face in my doorway. I would gladly hand over his damned DNA sample, would even provide it for him while he watched, if he would only come save me…

But I knew that it would not happen. They had no doubt I was innocent. The investigators knew their time was better spent elsewhere, chasing down real leads that had nothing to do with me.

Unfortunately, the only thing that mattered here… was what my neighbors believed.

I was alone. No one was coming to rescue me.

Or so I had thought…

Now, a hush fell over the crowd gathered on my lawn. I heard the assholes reacting to some unforeseen hitch in their plans—whispered questions and an aura of confusion rippled through the tides of scorn that had ebbed and flowed upon my property for days—and I knew I had not imagined it.

It was real: the purr of an engine. A soft whine of brakes. Tires on asphalt, rolling to a stop.

My heart raced. Chills of elation—of delicious hope—spread over my entire body.

A flurry of footsteps clunked upon my porch, receded down the steps, as whoever had been standing watch by the door marched across the lawn to confront my visitor.

Who could it be? I wondered, almost forgetting to breathe.

I ducked across the living room to the window, pulled back the curtain. Bright sunlight splashed into my home, temporarily blinding me.

Squinting, I peered through that ocean of bodies to steal a glimpse of my savior.

At the curb, beside the decapitated pole that had once been my mailbox, a shiny green Volvo idled in the street. Beads of water stippled its roof and hood, as if it had emerged from a carwash minutes ago.

My jaw dropped as the driver-side door opened.

And she stepped out.

***

“Karen!” I called to her from behind the spider-web pattern of shattered glass in my storm door. I knew it was a risky move, showing my face again to those who wished me dead, but somehow I fooled myself into believing that the screen between us kept me safe. For now.

Instantly, all eyes were upon me. My neighbors turned to glare my way, but for the next minute or so rampant disbelief replaced the murderous rage on their faces. They glanced at one another worriedly, as if they did not know what to do now that the enemy had reappeared.

Their numbers had doubled since the previous evening. That seething congregation of hate filled my yard, spilling out into the street where there was no more room left upon my property. How many were out there? Two dozen? Three? I had never realized so many people lived on Poinsettia Lane! Each of them still carried his or her makeshift weapon—bicycle chains, baseball bats, metal pipes, crowbars, sledgehammers, tire irons—and at their feet lay the evidence of all the fun they were having at my expense. Crushed beer cans, flattened Dixie cups, soggy cigarette butts, and broken liquor bottles littered the trampled grass everywhere I looked.

Someone, I noticed, had even defecated on my welcome mat. Recently. It lay coiled before me in a stinking wet pile, like a cruel gag gift.

I grasped the doorframe with both hands to keep from passing out, wondered when all of this had ceased to be about the death of an innocent child… and when it had become one gigantic fucking block party.

“Andy…?”

At the curb, her mouth hanging open as she gazed at the bedlam, stood my ex-wife. She wore a knee-length dress the same color as her car, dangling gold earrings and a modest touch of make-up. She had cut her hair since the last time I saw her, and unless it was a trick of the sunlight she might have added a few blond streaks to it as well.

In spite of my situation, I couldn’t help thinking that she looked gorgeous. Angelic.

“Andy? What the hell’s going on here?” she called to me from across the yard, a tremor in her voice.

“Karen!” I wept. “Oh, thank God… Karen!”

“What is this? I don’t—”

“Karen, please… you’ve got to get help!”

“Are you hurt? Jesus, what have they done to your—”

Impatience rippled through the crowd between us, drowning out the rest of her question. As one, my neighbors moved, shifting forward slightly.

I stepped back, braced myself for their attack. Prepared to slam the door.

“About time you showed your face!” Ben Souther shouted up at me from his place near the front of the mob. He wore a navy blue bathrobe above red-and-white plaid pajama bottoms, no shirt. “You’ve already made this a lot harder than it has to be, boy!”

“That’s right,” Floyd Beecham agreed from a few feet away. “We told you before, we just wanna talk to you! But you been locked up inside there, like you got something to hide!”

“Don’t look good on your part!” a younger, teenage voice insisted, but I could not see who said it.

“Shut up,” I growled at them, through clenched teeth. “Just… shut up. Karen, get back in your car. Get the hell out of here.”

“What is this, Andy?” she asked me again. “What’s happening? I was worried about you. We’ve been up at the lake the last few days. I tried to call, but—”

“Karen—”

“—I wanted to drop by and make sure you were okay—”

“Call the police. Go.”

No one moved. No one spoke. The air seemed to hum with tension.

Overhead, a distant airliner streaked across the sky. I wished I could be up there with its passengers. Comfortable. Safe. Peering down like an apathetic god upon someone else’s problems.

When Karen stepped over the curb and onto my lawn, my neighbors echoed my own shocked gasp. They each turned to gawk at her with the same incredulous expression they had displayed when I first came to the door. As if they did not believe the nerve of my ex-wife, daring to proceed. As if they could not understand how anyone would still choose to associate with me, after everything that had happened.

I watched, my pulse hammering violently within the wound upon my forehead, as they gripped their weapons tighter.

“Karen, no,” I whispered. “Don’t be stupid…”

As she parted the sea of bodies, Karen paused to make eye contact with several of my neighbors, and the look on her face was the one she used to scold Sam when our daughter misbehaved.

“Francine?” Karen said, when she swerved to avoid a broken beer bottle in her path and nearly collided with Floyd Beecham’s better half. “What are you doing here?”

Each subsequent victim of her admonishment stared down at his or her shoes, as if ashamed. For a brief moment, I saw the face of a kind neighbor I once knew. But only until my ex-wife’s back was turned, and she moved on to someone else…

“Donna? Patty? Yvonne?” Her brow creased as she glanced down at the rolling pin in Patty Carstensen’s chubby hand. “I don’t understand. You ladies are a part of this, too?”

She took several more steps toward my house, and as she did so she kept shaking her head in disgust.

“Is this some kind of twisted joke? Because if that’s what this is, it’s not the least bit funny. Sal? Sal Friedman? What is it you think Andy’s done? You should be ashamed of yourself, old man… I can’t believe you people. You know Andy…

She took several more steps, surveying the crowd.

“Is that you up there, Ben Souther? What the hell has gotten into you? I thought you were his friend. Joe? Eileen? My God, Charlene… put down those hedge-clippers before you hurt yourself.”

She stood within just five or six feet of my front porch when they finally spoke back.

Someone at the bottom of the steps—a young man I did not recognize right away, though he might have been Drew and JoLynn Pruitt’s boy, Darren—suddenly stopped Karen from going any further. He was tall, lanky, had a silver hoop in his eyebrow. He trembled with an obvious mixture of rage and nervous anticipation as he blocked Karen’s path with a long, thin lawnmower blade stained with splotches of green.

She looked down at it, back at the spiky-haired teenager.

“Excuse me,” she said in her nastiest tone.

“You shouldn’t have come here, lady,” he told her. “You’re going to get hurt.”

Undeterred, Karen replied, “Get the hell out of my way.”

“Andy made his bed,” shouted someone at the back of the crowd. Chad Rickman, perhaps. Or maybe Glenn Sommersville. “Now he’s gotta lie in it!”

“You people have lost your damn minds,” Karen said.

The crowd surged forward again, closing in on her.

“Maybe you were in on it, too,” someone said.

“Now look here—” Karen started, turning in a complete circle, searching for the person who would dare suggest such a thing.

For the first time, I recognized a hint of fear in her eyes.

“You left Andy for another man, didn’t you, Karen?” Ben Souther asked her. “So what are you doing here now?”

“I beg your pardon? I hardly think that’s any of your business, Ben.”

“It’s true! She’s nothing but a slut!” Ernie Tomblin shouted from his position at the far corner of my house. He sat perched on my porch railing, gripping the hilt of a rusty samurai sword in both hands, a sight I might have found insanely humorous if circumstances had been different. “A woman who’d marry a freak like that in the first place ain’t got no fucking morals!”

Sal Friedman: “She probably helped him think up all those hair-o books, I’ll bet you anything!”

“Birds of a feather,” added Francine Beecham. “They flock together!”

“Whore!” someone yelled.

“Tramp!”

“You fuckin’ slut!”

They all joined in then: “Slut! Whore! Slut! Whore!”

The unease on Karen’s face morphed into pure terror now.

She made a run for the house, but she had only taken two or three steps when someone shoved her backward. Hard. Her breath burst out of her in a hoarse grunt—“oofgh!”—and she fell onto her butt in the center of my yard.

My neighbors surrounded her, their chant rising to a deafening fever pitch: “Slut! Whore! Slut! Whore! Slut! Whore!”

Her hair hung in her eyes as Karen picked herself up off the ground. I noticed she had lost one of her high heels, but she did not attempt to retrieve it. Ugly grass stains streaked her fancy dress. A river of bright red blood leaked from her left palm—she must have sliced it open on a shard of broken glass or a crushed beer can when she fell.

“Get away from me! I’m warning you. Get away! You’re all crazy!”

My neighbors pointed their weapons at her, roared with laughter as she sprinted for the street.

“Karen!” I cried out to her.

“I’m sorry, Andy!” she screamed over her shoulder. “I’ll send help, I promise I will! They won’t get away with th—”

Karen made it to her car. Almost. But when she staggered off the curb and into the street, her remaining high heel betrayed her. She came down on it wrong, twisted her ankle. She collided with the side of the Volvo, smearing a sloppy checkmark of blood across its front wheel well.

She pivoted to the right, limping. Stumbled around the front of the car, fighting to reach the driver’s side.

But Lorne Childress blocked her way.

“Boo!”

Childress gripped the neck of a half-empty bottle of Pepe Lopez tequila. He cackled drunkenly, and the liquid sloshed around inside of his bottle as he shook it at Karen as if offering her a drink.

She let out a little yelp, twirled to flee in the other direction.

And Freddy Morgan leapt out of the crowd.

“Where you goin’, bitch?” he snarled.

In his sun-browned hands, Morgan clutched the plank of cedar ripped from his new deck—that two-by-four from which jutted three long, shiny, galvanized-steel nails.

“Leave me alone!” Karen wept. “Get out of my–”

What happened next seemed to occur in slow motion…

I watched, helpless to stop it, as Morgan reared back and swung the board at her with every ounce of strength in his skinny postman’s frame.

He swung it like a baseball star hitting the most magnificent home run of his career…

. . . swung it right into her face.

Even from where I stood behind my storm door, I could hear the sound those nails made as they pierced my ex-wife’s skull and sank into her brain. It was a sound not unlike that of three screwdrivers stabbing in perfect sync through a plump, ripe watermelon.

A golden spurt of urine trickled down Karen’s legs from under her dress, pooled on the pavement beneath her heels.

From the back of her throat came a wretched gurgling noise, a hideous hybrid of stupefied gasp and hoarse, orgasmic moan.

Her body jerked once. Twice.

Then it went limp.

My bowels lurched. Tunnel-vision blacked out everything around me except that God-awful sight across my lawn.

I heard sirens screeching in the distance. Loud, warbling. Shrill. But a few seconds later, I realized they were not sirens at all…

That keening wail came from me. It was my own delirious scream.

At the curb, Freddy Morgan’s eyes grew impossibly wide. His mouth hung open in a bewildered “O” as he stared at the dead woman on the end of his stick.

“Jesus Christ,” he babbled. “Agh, J-Jesus Christ.”

He dropped the two-by-four as if it had grown blistering-hot in his hands.

Karen crumpled to the asphalt with it.

Morgan doubled over behind the Volvo a second later, and spattered vomit across its bumper.

The crowd was silent.

Poinsettia Lane grew eerily, unsettlingly still…

My neighbors stood there staring at each other. At the murderer among them, and at that leaking, pink-crimson thing heaped upon the curb. Half of them looked sick, the other half frozen with fear. I wondered if they had finally come to their senses.

Hope bloomed within me for the first time in many days as eight or nine of my neighbors suddenly broke away from the crowd. They sprinted madly down the street, as if their crime were something tangible, a hideous monster from whom they could escape if they only ran fast and far enough from the grisly evidence sprawled half-on and half-off my lawn. More than a few of them were weeping as they went. Their cries of disbelief echoed through the neighborhood.

“I can’t be part of this no more!” I heard Steve Heatherly exclaim, while Gabe and Valerie Pearson fell to their knees in the middle of the cul-de-sac, clasped hands and started pleading with God to forgive them all.

Others staggered off drunkenly in no specific direction, their heads down, shoulders slumped, numbed by the realization of what they had become.

Perhaps the spell had been broken at last. Finally, my neighbors knew they had crossed a line that could never be uncrossed…

Well. Some of them.

The majority of Poinsettia Lane’s residents still stood in my yard. They watched the others go.

And then… those who had stayed behind turned toward me once again.

“He made this happen!” Donna Dunaway screamed. One hand lay atop her pregnant belly, as if shielding the child inside of her from the evil she presumed to lurk behind my screen door. The other stabbed into the air, pointing one long, skinny finger my way. “He’s the one responsible!”

“You fucking monster!” howled Mitzi Pastorek. “It’s all your fault! You planned this, didn’t you?”

I staggered back from the door. Grew dizzy.

Again, the entire neighborhood began to chant as one: “Your fault! Your fault! Your fault!”

“God damn you, Holland!” Sal Friedman wheezed at the foot of my porch steps, and I was quite sure I saw tears glistening on the old man’s wrinkled cheeks. “You won’t get away with this!”

They stormed the porch.

I slammed the door just in time. Threw the deadbolt as the whole house vibrated beneath their combined weight.

They batted at the doors and windows. Screeched my name again and again and again.

I waited with my back to the door, wondering when they would bust through. This is it, I knew… this is how it ends… any second now…

But they didn’t. They didn’t break through.

Because, I soon realized, my neighbors had work to do.

A few minutes later, when the commotion had temporarily subsided, I dared to peek outside through a miniscule gap in my living room curtain.

. . . and I witnessed several men at the rear of the mob clearing the scene of their crime. Rushing to hide the evidence.

The Volvo I had bought for Karen two Christmases ago slowly pulled away from the curb. Ben Souther’s burly form looked so awkward and out-of-place behind the wheel, but as he steered the car through a three-point turn he moved like a man embarking on a mission of utmost importance. Just before he drove away, I noticed that he was drinking from Lorne Childress’s tequila bottle, as if its contents instilled in Ben the courage he needed to continue with this conspiracy.

In the Volvo’s wake, Childress and Freddy Morgan were hard at work dragging my ex-wife’s corpse down the street.

The ghastly, clotted snail-trail her ruined head left upon the pavement was the color of cherry pie gone to rot.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Night. Again. A thin sliver of yellowish moon hung above Poinsettia Lane like a sleepy eye observing the proceedings below with half-hearted interest.

Surrounded by darkness, I sat on my sofa, my arms wrapped around my knees.

Meanwhile, the chaos outside my home continued…

Glass shattered in my driveway. Something boomed on the roof. A woman giggled as if she were having the time of her life.

At the rear of the house, my kitchen doorknob rattled like an angry serpent.

But I did not even flinch.

In some strange way, I found myself growing accustomed to it all. To this endless soundtrack of Hell all around me.

A low crunch on the front porch—the sound of a beer can crushed underfoot—and someone pounded a sloppy “shave-and-a-haircut” tattoo upon my front door.

“Andy?” It was Joe Tuttle, the black guy down the block who used to plead with me to come speak to his eighth-grade English class back when things were good. His voice was slurred with obvious inebriation: “Hey, Andy. You home? Hmmm? You in there, you sick muthafucka?”

“Don’t be rude, Holland,” Floyd Beecham jeered from the opposite side of the house. “Your ex is here to see ya!”

“Don’t forget his pooch!” yelled someone else.

That was followed by more uproarious laughter, from what sounded like at least thirty or forty people. Of course, there couldn’t have been that many of them out there—could there?

I shuddered. Hated them all with every fiber of my being. I fantasized picking them off one by one with a chattering AK-47, mentally choreographed their dance of death as round after round ripped through their bodies. The thought nearly aroused me.

Then, the awful reality of my situation—of what they had done to Karen—came crashing down on me again. I ran one hand through my unwashed hair. A distraught groan escaped from the back of my throat.

I wondered where they had hidden her body.

I couldn’t believe she was dead. My eyes burned with tears as I remembered the good times my ex-wife and I had shared. We’d had our problems, sure, especially after she decided to leave me for another man, but I never would have wished any harm to come to her. Once upon a time, I believed she was my soul-mate. She had given birth to my only child, and thus some small part of me deep down inside would undoubtedly love her forever.

Now she was gone. Murdered. Buried, I assumed, in a shallow grave in one of my neighbors’ backyards.

I wondered how I would tell Samantha what had happened to her mother, if I lived long enough to face such a dilemma.

“Jesus,” I sobbed. “Why…”

I closed my eyes, shuddered. The thickest, blackest darkness I had ever known swallowed me whole as I sat there rocking back and forth on the sofa. Images of Karen’s murder replayed in my brain again and again, like clips from a gory B-movie…

Did any of them feel the slightest bit of remorse, I wondered? Or did my neighbors view their crime as nothing more than a justifiable means to an end?

I gnawed at my fingernails and whispered, “I’m sorry, Karen. God, I’m so sorry…”

As I sat there listening to the never-ending turmoil outside—

“Come out, Andy, come out! Andy, Andy, come out!” Ben Souther began their latest mantra, and before long the rest of the mob joined in his song at the top of their lungs—my writer’s mind soon shifted into overdrive. I couldn’t help pondering how this whole outrageous scenario might have originated in the world of speculative fiction. In my novels, the bloodthirsty throng surrounding my home would have been possessed by some ancient demon or infected with a deadly virus that transformed them into slavering zombies. Perhaps, in a plot already done to death a trillion times, Poinsettia Lane would have been built upon some cursed Indian burial ground. Or a site once designated for top-secret nuclear testing.

“HA!”

When I thought about that I began to laugh at the insanity of it all. It was a high-pitched, frantic laugh—the mad cackle of a lunatic locked inside his rubber room.

I thought about Robert Neville, the protagonist in Richard Matheson’s seminal tale of the last man on Earth, I Am Legend. It had always been one of my favorite horror stories, and now I felt as if I were living within its fictional world. I remembered how Neville spent his every waking hour sharpening dowel rods into stakes, fortifying his house against legions of the undead by draping his doors and windows with cloves of garlic.

I wished it were so easy.

I wished I could repel the monsters at my door with garlic. Or holy water. Silver.

But this was not fiction.

The horrors lurking outside my house were real, and they were driven by something much more powerful than a satanic lust for human flesh or a desire to rule the world.

Gossip fueled their fury. Rumors, lies, and misinformation. A deluded desire for vengeance that had escalated into nothing less than a textbook case of mass hysteria…

The irony was enough to make me never stop laughing until I dropped to the ground, asphyxiated.

This was every book, every movie, I had cherished since my childhood. It was every macabre tale that had made me a writer within this genre which had ultimately betrayed me…

This was Night of the Living Dead. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. This was The Wicker Man and Straw Dogs and The Hills Have Eyes and The Shadow Over Innsmouth, right here in Middle America. My detractors were the villagers in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, brandishing their torches and pitchforks as they screamed for the monster’s blood…

My blood.

Unlike the tales of terror I once adored, however, this nightmare could not be so neatly resolved once the book was closed, when the credits began to roll.

“Dear God,” I moaned, covering my ears, holding my head in my hands.

Outside, something heavy and wet struck the house behind me, and the sickening splat it made when it hit the other side of the living room wall reminded me of the sound those nails had made as they plunged into my ex-wife’s brain.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

By noon the next day, approximately seventeen hours after they killed her, I knew where my neighbors had stashed Karen’s body.

In the torrid heat of summer, the proof loomed all around me…

Like a noxious gas my captors pumped into my home in an attempt to drive me out, it seeped through the floorboards. It wafted up through the central air vents in every room. It sent me staggering into the bathroom, where I dry-heaved into the toilet until my throat was raw…

The unmistakable, sickly-sweet stench of death.

With a glance outside, through the kitchen window, I knew what they had done. The spot where I had buried Norman’s body had been disturbed. Now, instead of the neat, tramped-down earth that had marked his grave for the last six days, I saw a larger, fresh mound of dirt in the middle of my backyard. A shovel with a broken, splintered handle stuck up from the mound, like an insincere monument to everything my best friend had meant to me.

The stained blue tarp in which I had wrapped his body lay a few feet away, discarded in a wrinkled heap against my privacy fence.

They could have buried them together, but that would have been too easy. That would have been sane.

No… their intentions were immediately clear.

My neighbors were taunting me. Adding insult to injury. They could have busted into my home at any time, overtaken me with little effort. But they were enjoying this. Getting off on it. If I would not give myself up to them, they wanted me to suffer.

They had exhumed Norman.

They had hidden Karen’s body in his grave.

Then, they had stashed the dog’s rotting corpse beneath me. In the crawlspace under my house.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

That pungent stink of hot decay permeated the whole house as another long afternoon passed. It crawled inside my nostrils like a parasite infesting my sinuses. It thickened the air around me with its foul taint, seemed to coat my flesh and all of my belongings like a slimy yet invisible film.

I covered my mouth and nose with a washcloth soaked in my most expensive brand of cologne, but that barely helped at all.

The smell of Norman was everywhere. I could even taste it.

I wondered what Karen looked like, out there under the earth. I envisioned the bacteria and insects devouring the pretty flesh I had once loved to kiss and caress…

I prayed for this all to be a nightmare. Pleaded with a God I wasn’t even sure if I believed in to wake me now, for my life to return to normal.

And, eventually, I went to work.

***

Sweat dripped down my neck, darkening my T-shirt in sticky gray patches, and before long every muscle in my body burned with exertion as I frantically tore apart my furniture. I worked without a break for several hours, cracking and ripping and busting and chopping like a man obsessed. I paused only to wipe my brow every few minutes, or to spray air freshener throughout the house for the umpteenth time, or to gag beneath the stench of my poor Norman rotting underfoot. “More wood,” I mumbled to myself while I purposefully demolished my belongings, and more than once I giggled beneath my breath as if privy to a joke no one else in the world had ever heard, “I’ll need more wood. More wood. That’s not enough. Still not enough! No… gotta have more!”

The clamor inside my home now echoed the chaos outside.

First, I disassembled my computer desk. Then the two bookshelves beside it. My entertainment center. Then the kitchen table. The coffee table, in the living room. An old knick-knack shelf. The stereo cabinet in my office. My bed.

“What else is there? What else…? Think, dammit, think! Oh, yeah… yeah, that’s perfect…”

I drew the line at Sam’s room. More than once I found myself pacing back and forth outside her door, thinking of all the wonderful wood that waited for me inside there. I knew that the frame of my daughter’s bed, her dresser, her closet doors, and the massive toy-box her Uncle Toby had built for her seventh birthday were exactly what I needed to complete my project.

But I refused to destroy anything that belonged to Samantha. Because doing so felt like sacrilege. A desecration of our relationship. My daughter’s perfect, untouched room was the only thing in my life that had maintained a state of sameness after every terrible thing that had transpired these last few weeks. It was the only part of my miserable life that remained wholly intact when everything else had been shattered. I refused to ruin that, even as a last resort.

Finally, by the time a new day arrived, I had removed every door inside the house from its hinges (with the exception of Samantha’s). Bedroom doors. Closet doors. Even the smaller cabinet doors from the kitchen and under the bathroom sink.

When I was done, my hands were bloody and raw.

A miniature mountain of wood lay piled in the middle of my kitchen, jagged and splintered, heaped halfway to the ceiling like the makings of a bonfire waiting to be lit.

As I stared at the rubble, nodding victoriously over what I had wrought, I felt like Richard Dreyfuss at the height of his madness in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

The thought made a crazy chuckle slip out of me. Then another.

Finally, I slammed a hand over my mouth, stifling the laughter.

Back to work…

I had put this off for far too long, I decided. It was time to barricade my home, to board up the doors and windows Night of the Living Dead-style. Time to secure my domain, once and for all…

My neighbors had proven themselves capable of cold-blooded murder. I knew they would soon grow bored with tormenting me. When Norman’s stink did not drive me out to face their wrath, their next step would undoubtedly be coming inside to drag me out.

God only knew why they hadn’t already.

They had tasted blood. Soon they would want more.

Before long they would seek new ways to entertain themselves. It was only a matter of time.

I did not want to think about what the good people of Poinsettia Lane might do to me next.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

I started at the rear of the house, with the back door.

But I never got a chance to finish the job.

Because, at the exact moment I was preparing to slam home that first nail… I heard another car pull up outside.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

I tried not to get too excited. Remembered what had happened the last time “help” arrived.

I knew this would end badly once again.

Still, I crawled across the living room floor on my hands and knees, pulled back the curtain and peered outside.

Rolling to a jerky stop in my driveway was a dark blue Jeep Liberty. I recognized the vehicle right away because of the tag on its front bumper: two plump purple valentines joined together by an arrow, beneath the airbrushed slogan J + K.

“Jason!” My voice was little more than a pitiful squeak.

I stood, yanked open the front door without thinking about what I was doing, and stumbled out into the pinkish light of dawn, still clutching the hammer in one hand. Too late, I realized I had should have retrieved my homemade spear before coming outside.

Instantly, the crowd turned toward me.

“Hey!” someone shouted. “There he is!”

“Lookie here! It shows itself!”

“Holland, you sick fucker!”

“Jason!” I shouted across the yard, ignoring them all. “Thank God… Jason!”

A flash of movement in my peripheral vision. I flinched.

To my right, less than a dozen feet from me, Floyd Beecham stood urinating in one corner of my porch. I noticed it was a small pile of my mail—mail that had obviously been intercepted over the last few days by our own resident postman, Freddy Morgan—that he drenched with his pungent yellow stream. When he spotted me standing there, Floyd quickly tucked himself inside his dirty pajama bottoms, retrieved his leather strop off the railing behind him, and growled, “You’ve got a lot of nerve, fuck.”

And then the smell hit me. I realized he hadn’t been pissing at all.

No, I had gotten that all wrong…

When I came out of the house, Floyd had quickly replaced the cap on something that now sat abandoned in the corner behind him.

A plastic can. Small. Square. Red.

CAUTION: GASOLINE, read the logo on its side.

Beecham glanced over at his companions on the lawn, then back at me. He took several steps in my direction, his boots clunking heavily on the hardwood floor of the porch. He tensed to make his move if I dared try to escape. But for now he came no closer.

In the driveway, the man who had stolen my wife from me climbed out of his Liberty. He rounded the front of the vehicle, his brow furrowed. There was a deep crimson flush to his normally sun-browned face. He wore jeans and a maroon turtleneck beneath a brown suit-coat with beige elbow patches.

“Jason!” I called out, over the heads of my neighbors. “Jason, up here!”

For several seconds, the man I had once loathed more than anyone else on Earth stood there staring at the crowd upon my lawn, as if they were some complicated trigonometry problem he was desperately trying to decipher.

Never in my life had I been so happy to see anyone.

“What in the world—?” said Jason Burke. Although the commotion on my lawn drowned out the sound of his voice, I could read his lips.

“Jason, you gotta help me,” I cried. “Please—”

“What’s going on here?” he yelled back. “What is this, Holland?”

“They… they killed her… p-please…”

“You should leave, fella,” Floyd Beecham shouted Burke’s way. “This doesn’t concern you.”

“Yeah!” said Donna Dunaway. “Get the fuck outta here, blondie!”

“I beg your pardon?” said Jason Burke.

From his place in the center of the mob, Ben Souther urged more calmly, “Be on your way, sir. Please? We’ve got a lot to discuss with your buddy here.”

“I wouldn’t say he’s my buddy,” said Burke.

His worried gaze returned to me. Sweat glistened on his tanned forehead.

“Karen didn’t come home last night, Andrew. I’ve been looking all over for her. Did she stay here with you? Just tell me the truth, man. That’s all I ask.”

“She… what? No. It’s not… she… listen, Jason—”

Whispers rolled through the mob between us, like static on a weak radio. Murmurs of impatience.

“Jason, you’ve got to—”

“Where is she? I’m serious, Andrew—if she’s inside, just tell me she’s with you and I’ll walk away right now. I won’t get in your way.” His eyes scanned the crowd on my lawn again, taking in the chaos before him. “I don’t have to know what’s going on here. I don’t want to know.”

“The cunt is dead!” Mitzi Pastorek shouted, from somewhere within the mob. “Get over it!”

The others laughed.

Francine Beecham yelled, “And good riddance, I’d say!”

Jason Burke stared up at me. His lips quivered as he waited for me to confirm what he had just been told. “D-dead? Andrew, what are they—”

I shot a hateful glance over at Floyd Beecham, then stared down at my shoes. I swallowed a massive lump in my throat, shuddered when it went down.

“What are they talking about?” Burke shouted up at me, his hands balled into tight red fists. “You’d better tell me what’s going on right now!”

His voice sounded whiny. Like a spoiled child about to cry. And I could not blame him in the least.

I glanced across the yard, grimaced at the sight of Karen’s brains dried in a crusty red-black swath upon the street.

“It’s true,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“No…”

“Karen’s dead.”

“Oh my God.” He swayed back and forth where he stood. Reached out for something to hold on to, but grasped only air. “Oh, dear God… no…”

“They killed her, Jason.”

“It was his fault!” Sal Friedman bellowed. He pointed one of his prized nine-irons at me, shook it as if wringing my neck from afar. I noticed it was crooked, bent, a side effect of the vandalism he had helped inflict upon my property.

“You’ve got to get help, Jason,” I said. “Call the police!”

“You couldn’t let us be happy, could you?” he screamed up at me. “If you can’t have her, no one will—is that it?”

The crowd watched me, as if they wanted to know the answer to that question as much as Jason Burke.

“I… what? No… it wasn’t anything like that, Jason. They did it. They all think… they think I—”

Then, before I could say anything else, something in my peripheral vision demanded my attention.

I spotted a flash of gold inside Jason’s SUV…

A glimpse of blond hair and pink barrettes.

The earth seemed to drop out from under me as the passenger-side door fell open, and I heard: “Daddy…?”

“Oh, Jesus!” I gasped. “Samantha!”

My daughter slid out of the SUV to stand behind Jason in the driveway.

The crowd turned toward her as one.

“Get back in the car, baby,” Jason told her.

But she did not listen. She eyed my neighbors and the weapons in their hands with a mixture of curiosity and naïve suspicion.

“Daddy?” she said. “Are you okay? What’s going on? Where’s Mom?”

“I told you he likes ’em young,” someone mumbled at the foot of my steps.

“J-just… do as Jason says, sweetheart,” I told Sam. “Get back in the car. Now.”

Sam singled out Ben Souther in the crowd, tilted her head to one side as she made eye contact with my next-door neighbor.

“Mr. Souther?” she said. “Are you mad at my daddy for something? What did he do?”

“Your father is a bad man,” Ben replied.

“Samantha, get back in the car,” Jason told her again.

“I’m scared, Jason. Where’s Mom?”

“Enough of this horseshit,” Floyd Beecham said, turning to rouse the crowd. “We’ve got business with Holland!”

“Damn straight!” shouted Joe Tuttle. “Let’s get that bastard, Floyd!”

The mob surged forward, their weapons clanking against one another, their shouts of derision sounding like little more than wild animal grunts.

Floyd raised his leather strop in the air as he stepped toward me on the porch.

I saw it in his eyes, then, in that last second or two before he went to work on me, and it sent an icy chill down my spine: to Floyd Beecham, I was the man who had stolen his daughter away from him so many years ago. This wasn’t about Rebecca Lanning, or the child who was murdered behind the bookstore. To Floyd and his wife, this was personal. I was the one who had murdered their little girl, long before Rebecca Faye Lanning was even born. The faceless killer from their past was faceless no more… now, to Floyd and Francine Beecham, he looked just like me.

At last, they had their shot at vengeance. It had been a long time coming.

They all needed someone to blame. And I was their sacrificial lamb.

“Court is in session, fucker,” Floyd snarled at me through clenched yellow teeth. A wiry mess of unshaven whiskers crawled across his chin like silver kudzu. His eyes were bloodshot, crusty-looking, and rimmed with dark blue bags, as if he had not slept since this all began. He smelled like a walking bottle of 190-proof vodka.

We stood there glaring at one another. Unmoving.

“Don’t you even think of goin’ anywhere,” he said. “This ends today.”

“I know it does,” I said, gripping the hammer so tightly my knuckles turned bone-white.

Floyd swung his leather strop as hard as he could. With every ounce of strength in his skinny frame.

I brought the hammer up to block his attack, but he got me in the ribs.

I yelped in pain, and he hit me again across the neck.

“Get ’im!” I heard Sal Friedman cheer Floyd on. “Whip the shit outta that sumbitch, F.B.!”

I lunged forward, striking Floyd with the hammer. It got him in the chest. He squealed like a little girl, recoiled, but only for a second or two.

“You’re dead meat,” he said.

I moved to hit him again, but suddenly he had help. A sharp rock struck me in the center of my chest. I staggered back. Another bounced off my collarbone. My left arm. My hip.

“Daddy!” Samantha wailed.

I dropped the hammer. It clunked down the porch steps like a fairweather friend trying to distance itself from me and my dilemma. I held my arms in front of my face, crashed into my storm door as a blizzard of pain pelted me from every direction.

“Stop it!” Samantha shrieked. “You’re hurting my daddy!”

“Go, Sam! Jason, get her out of here now!” I screamed again as another sharp stone carved a deep gash across my left cheek.

And then, even as their jagged missiles tore my flesh, as Floyd Beecham’s leather strop thrashed again and again at my shoulders and his liquor breaths exploded in my ear with every lash, I was aware of Samantha moving toward me, through the crowd.

“Sam, no!”

“Please… stop it!” she cried.

Blood filled my eyes. I fell to my knees, wiped it away…

. . . and I saw their hands on my daughter.

Samantha’s terrified wail reverberated across my property: “Daddy!”

In the middle of the yard, Donna Dunaway’s hands were entangled in Sam’s long blond hair. Sam kicked at the bitch’s shins, struggled to get away. Sal Friedman gripped her left arm in one gnarled, liver-spotted claw.

I knew I was outnumbered. Knew there was no way I would ever make it through that roiling mass of bodies alive.

But they had my daughter. Dear God… they were going to hurt Samantha…

At the rear of the mob, Jason Burke fought to reach Sam, but Joe Tuttle slammed an elbow into his face. A fountain of bright red blood gushed from Jason’s nose, and he collapsed against his SUV with a startled yelp.

“Jesus… oh, my Lord,” I heard him babbling beneath the river of gore streaming down his face.

Through the blood in my own eyes, I watched Jason fumble through the pockets of his fancy suit-coat. He pulled out his cell phone, nearly dropped it. Flipped it open with hands that trembled worse than those of a man twice his age.

But before he had a chance to use it, the phone was torn from his grip.

It flew into the air above the mob, and a second later—BANG!—it clattered into the street and exploded into a hundred pieces, batted like a home-run softball off the end of Darren Pruitt’s lawnmower blade.

Jason tried to stand, but someone’s heavy black boot collided with his abdomen, and again he went sprawling against his Jeep Liberty.

“Samantha,” he cried.

At last, Floyd Beecham ceased flogging me with his leather strop.

The leather squeaked as he wrapped it tightly around his left wrist.

“What comes around goes around, Short Eyes,” he whispered in my ear, before punching me in the face. I noticed a big, hairy wart sprouted from one of his knuckles. It had busted during our one-sided melee, and its tiny black seeds were smeared across the back of his hand.

Then Floyd was gone. He left me alone with my pain, leapt over my porch railing to join the bedlam in the yard.

“Let’s see you write a book about this!” raved Donna Dunaway, and she looked nothing like herself now. As she glowered up at me, her dirty brown hair hanging in her wild eyes, her stretch-marked belly hanging half out of her rumpled maternity blouse, Donna resembled something swollen and possessed, alien and obscene.

“Get your fucking hands off my daughter!” I roared.

I dove headfirst into the crowd, into that swarm of murderous faces and flailing limbs and deadly, swinging weapons.

“Die, motherfucker!” someone screamed in my ear.

“Get the pervert! Don’t let him get away!”

“Watch out! There he is!”

“Stop him!”

“Kill him!”

“Save some for me, goddammit!”

Hands slapped and punched and clawed and scratched at my body. Fingers stabbed into my throat, gouged my eyes. Pipes, crowbars, rolling pins, and fireplace pokers crashed against my skull and banged into my spine and pummeled my torso. A rusty bicycle chain lashed across my chest, ripping open my T-shirt as well as my flesh. My collarbone cracked beneath the splintery handle of a broken pick-axe. Francine Beecham’s metal cane slammed into my face with the impact of a small pickup truck. My mouth filled with blood, and bright bursts of color danced before my eyes like Fourth of July fireworks spiraling out of control. Still, I pushed onward, onward, with every last shred of strength I could find within myself. The sour stench of perspiration, of bodies gone unwashed for days, filled my stinging nostrils as I swam through that sea of animosity, fighting to reach my daughter. The agony my neighbors inflicted upon me during those few seconds when I dared to plunge into the horde brought back awful crimson memories of the beating I had suffered at the hands of Bridget Prescott’s father and her two brothers almost twenty years before. But I did not stop. I wouldn’t stop. Not for anything. The bastards would have to kill me first. I could focus on only one thing now—saving Samantha. Bleeding and bruised, I forced myself to keep moving, because I knew if I slowed down for even a second my assailants would crush me beneath their overwhelming numbers. They would rip me apart. I collided head-on with their weapons, absorbing the impact of each as best I could, taking the offensive in order to drive them back…

Somehow, I made it through.

When Donna Dunaway and Sal Friedman saw me coming, they slung Samantha aside. She crumpled on top of Jason Burke as if she weighed no more than one of her beloved dolls.

Friedman pointed his crooked golf club at me. “What are you gonna do, boy? Huh? What are you gonna do?”

Donna stepped back, made a ghastly, unladylike sound in the back of her throat, and spat a thick green wad of phlegm my way. It landed in the grass at my feet.

“Daddy!” Sam cried. “Oh, Daddy!”

She ran to me, threw her arms around my neck. Her face glistened with tears.

I held her tight, sobbed, “It’s okay. Shh. I’m here now. D-Daddy’s here. I’m not gonna let them hurt you anymore—”

A shard of searing, white-hot pain lanced through my left shoulder.

I screamed.

Sam’s mouth fell open in a horrified “O.”

Protruding from my chest, just two or three inches below my heart and even less from my daughter’s right eye, was a long silver crochet needle.

It wiggled in its place, rotated in a twitchy circular motion as whomever had stabbed me with it churned the needle around in my flesh. Widening the hole. Trying his or her damnedest to push it all the way through.

“Gahh! Aghhh, Jesus! Jeeeeezusss!!!”

Nothing in my life had ever hurt this bad.

Samantha fell back, out of my arms.

“Daddy!” she wailed, staring at the gore-streaked spike in my chest.

I tried to rise to my feet, stumbled.

“Daddy, get up! Get up!”

“Go, baby,” I told her, through clenched teeth. “G-go to… Jason. Hurry…”

“Dad, no! Please! Please come with me!”

“Go, Samantha!”

The crochet needle withdrew from my shoulder. I watched it melt into my left pec, shrinking into me in reverse as if it had never been there at all, and then it exited out my back with a brief, final tug and a sick wet slurping noise.

Something heavy smashed into my spine.

My vision blurred. The world tilted, spun.

This was it, I knew. They were finally going to end it. Any second now they would finish me off, while my daughter watched…

And that was when the gunshot ripped apart the dusk.

I ducked, covered my head.

The crowd gasped.

The shot echoed through the street for several long seconds, like multiple explosions detonating up and down Poinsettia Lane.

At the edge of my driveway, Jason Burke stood with one trembling hand held high above his head. The passenger-side door of his Liberty hung open, and inside I saw his glove compartment had puked a rainbow of papers onto the vehicle’s floorboard, where he had gone searching for something moments ago…

Obviously, he had found what he was looking for. It wasn’t the Bible on the front seat.

A thin wisp of smoke drifted heavenward from the barrel of the gun in Jason’s hand.

I didn’t know what kind of gun it was. I didn’t care. I just knew it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I could not take my eyes off of it.

“Get in the car, Samantha,” Jason said, trying his damnedest to sound calm. But an audible tremor lurked within his voice.

He pointed the gun at my neighbors.

“Move away from her. Let her through. I’m not kidding.”

The mob obeyed. Slowly, hesitantly, they backed away from my daughter and me…

Jason stepped forward, helped Sam to her feet with his free hand.

“I want my Daddy,” she cried, as he shoved her into the SUV.

Jason turned back to me. He held the gun on my neighbors, but in his furiously quivering hand the weapon resembled little more than a silver-black blur.

He wiped his bloody chin on the sleeve of his jacket.

“Time to go, Andy,” he said.

I nodded weakly, stood. My legs felt as if they had turned to liquid. My countless cuts and scrapes and bruises screamed in silent agony as I limped toward Jason’s vehicle.

But the second I stepped onto the blacktop, a bulky arm wrapped tight around my throat.

“Not so fast,” someone growled in my ear.

“Break the fucker’s neck!” a man shouted.

“Die, Holland, die!”

Jason’s Jeep sat less than six feet away. But I could not move.

I kicked at my attacker’s shins, tried to slam the back of my head into his face. With every move I made, I felt the hole in my chest grow wider, dribbling its gore down my abdomen.

I watched, helpless, as Jason slammed the Liberty’s passenger-side door. He glanced back at me before quickly rounding the vehicle. Moving for the driver’s side without wasting a second. He tripped once on his way, but did not fall.

Sam’s pale hands batted and squeaked against the window, her frantic sobs muffled behind the glass as she witnessed these last few seconds of my life…

“Daddy!”

“J-Jason,” I wheezed. “Please…”

Again, he glanced back at me. His lips parted as if he were about to say something, but nothing came out. The expression on his face was that of a man forced to make the most important decision of his life, against his will.

“How’s this for a hair-o story, you twisted son of a bitch,” Sal Friedman said, stepping between us and rearing back with his golf club to sink it into my face.

My eyes locked with Jason Burke’s.

“Jason,” I rasped. “T-take care of Sam… m-make sure she knows how much I love her… how much her mother loved her…”

The vice-grip on my throat let up then, but only to allow Sal Friedman to have his way with me.

“Fore!” Sal shrieked at the top of his lungs.

Jason threw the gun to me. A weak, underarm toss.

Somehow, I caught it. Barely. It bounced off my chest, would have landed in the grass at my feet if my right index finger had not looped through its trigger guard at the last second, trapping it against my thigh.

The pistol felt warm in my bloodstained hands. Like something sentient. Alive. Hungry.

The crowd gasped again in unison, recoiled from me.

Sal Friedman’s eyes went wide with terror. He dropped his nine-iron.

“Now, Mr. Writer Fella, you know I didn’t mean it,” he said, and a nervous little laugh followed the senior citizen’s words.

But the big man behind me did not shrink back with the rest of the mob. His arms wrapped around my neck again, and he hauled me violently off my feet. He squeezed tighter than ever. Colored spots danced before my eyes, and I felt consciousness slipping away bit by bit like a ridiculous pipe dream.

“ ‘When defeat is inevitable, it is wisest to yield,’ ” an all-too-familiar voice whispered in my ear. It belonged to a man I once considered a friend, a man with whom I had shared many an ice-cold beer on countless warm summer nights. A guy who kept a clever quotation on hand for any scenario.

“ ‘I wanted you to see… what real courage is,’ ” he grunted as we struggled, “ ‘Instead of getting the idea… that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked… before you begin… but you begin anyway… and you see it through no matter what.’ ”

A massive, sharp-knuckled fist rammed into my kidney.

“That’s from To Kill a Mockingbird, Andy. I’m sure you’ve read it. And one might argue that the words of Edmund Burke are relevant as well to what’s been happening in our neighborhood of late: ‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’ ”

He almost sounded as if he were about to cry as he finished.

“I’m sorry, old friend. I can’t stand by and do nothing. You know that’s just not me.”

He wrenched my skull violently to one side, as if trying to snap my neck. His breath was hot on the back of my head. It smelled like boiled cabbage, and during those next few seconds, in spite of my predicament, I found myself wondering if that was what my former friend had eaten for dinner earlier this evening. Boiled cabbage. I imagined him plopping down at his dining room table just like every night… perhaps saying Grace as quickly as possible ’cause tormenting the writer next door sure did build up a man’s appetite… I imagined him digging in, somehow living his life as if there were nothing out of the ordinary happening in our fair neighborhood… and then, after he finished with his dinner, he would compliment his wife on another wonderful meal… he would kiss her in that safe, hurried way old married couples kiss, and perhaps he would carry his dirty dishes to the sink, helping her wash them and rinse them and put them away so they could waste no time rejoining the fray next door… until it all led up to the here and now… to this bear of a man with his silver-haired, U.S. NAVy-tattooed arm curled around my throat, breathing his boiled cabbage breath onto the nape of my neck as if it were the hot, rank breath of Lucifer himself and he had come to claim my soul…

Tighter, he squeezed. Tighter. Crushing my windpipe…

“Nuh-oh,” I fought for air, “Gggkkk… B-Ben… Ben, plea—”

Suddenly, I remembered the gun in my hand. Dangling from my fingertips.

It was my last chance, I knew. My only chance.

I brought it up. Slowly. Tilted it back, blindly aiming over my shoulder for the man strangling me. For a second or two, I stared down into the pistol’s pitch-black barrel, but I did not stop to consider the possibility that I might shoot myself.

When the gun was parallel with my temple, just inches from my right ear, I pulled the trigger.

The world seemed to explode.

Something hot and wet splashed against the nape of my neck.

I stumbled forward, free at last from my neighbor’s deadly clutch.

Sucking in sweet, exhilarating lungfuls of oxygen, I whirled around to see Ben Souther holding both hands to his throat. Dark blood bubbled up between his fingers, gushed through his wiry gray chest hair in an endless river of red.

He gawked at me as if I had just insulted his entire family tree.

Then he collapsed on my lawn face-first.

I turned, pivoting on one foot. A foot that felt broken in several places. In the corner of my eye, Marianne Souther ran to her husband, fell atop his body, and started trying to shake him awake.

I pointed the gun at the circle of enraged faces surrounding me.

“Step back,” I told them, as I rubbed at my bruised Adam’s apple with my free hand.

I could not hear my own voice. I couldn’t hear anything. The gunshot had deafened me.

“All of you… get back right now… I’m not fucking kidding! Goddamn you, get back!”

Sal Friedman came at me with his golf club.

I shot him in the crotch, and he went down in a spray of crimson.

The old man writhed in the grass at my feet, holding himself through his tattered pink golf pants. I smelled piss, shit, blood, cum, smoke, gasoline, and gunpowder. But mostly blood. So much blood. Sal’s agonized yowls no doubt filled the neighborhood. But his suffering was silent to me.

I nearly dropped the gun when I saw what I had done.

But then I quickly regained my composure. I knew they had given me no choice…

“Let me through!” I shouted, holding my free hand to the wound in my chest.

The crowd wanted to tear me apart. I could see it in their eyes. But they obeyed, begrudgingly. They stepped back several feet, slowly clearing my path to Jason’s Liberty.

“That’s right,” I spat. As I limped toward the vehicle, wincing with every torturous step, I turned in a complete circle, covering my neighbors with the gun, making sure none of them could get the drop on me again. “Don’t come any closer… don’t even fucking move… or I swear to God I’ll—”

When I again faced Jason’s vehicle, I squinted through the blood caked in my eyes to see Donna Dunaway standing in the SUV’s open passenger-side door, dragging Samantha out by her hair. From his place behind the wheel, Jason engaged in a furious tug-of-war with the pregnant woman, fighting to keep Sam inside with him, but his awkward, one-handed grip on her wrist proved no match for his opponent’s vengeance-fueled strength.

“Daddy! No! Daddy, help me!” Samantha shrieked.

Her voice sounded as if it came to me from miles away. A shrill ringing filled my ears, drowning out everything else.

The crowd moved further back as I stabbed my way through them with the gun. Several of my neighbors dropped their weapons, ran for the street as if they had never fully believed in their cause to begin with.

“Get the fuck out of my way!” I shouted to those who remained on my lawn. “Move!”

Sam tumbled out of the Liberty, landed on her knees in the driveway at Donna Dunaway’s feet.

She reached out to me.

“You little bitch,” I could faintly hear Donna screeching at Sam as I drew closer. “Do you know what your father is?”

Her sharp fingernails raked across Sam’s face, drawing four bright red streaks in her soft pink cheeks.

“No!” I screamed.

Rough hands gripped the back of my shirt, jerking me back. I reached out for my daughter, bellowed her name again, but the distance between us doubled… tripled…

Without even thinking about it, I aimed the gun at Donna Dunaway.

I pulled the trigger, and an ugly brown hole appeared in her left breast. A hole that matched my own.

Donna looked surprised.

She fell.

But then, a second later, she barely seemed to notice her injury at all.

Her body lay sprawled on the blacktop, but Donna’s hands climbed up Sam’s torso like bloodthirsty creatures with minds of their own—like jittery, flesh-colored spiders—to lock on the child’s skinny throat. It might have been nothing more than the reflexes of violent death, but I could not be sure. Sam’s eyes bulged out, and her face turned blue as Donna squeezed with all her might.

I looked away, bit down hard upon my bottom lip, as I shot Donna Dunaway again… this time in her pregnant belly.

Her hands fell away from Sam’s throat. She lay still.

Around me, the mob’s muted fury rose to a fever pitch now. Their weapons struck my flesh, pounded relentlessly at my spine.

“Samantha, get in the car! Go!”

Sam stood. Wobbled. Fell to her knees again. Knelt there in the driveway, her body hitching with sobs.

Abruptly, the crowd cleared a path for me to reach Sam. Even as I bent over her, a voice in the back of my mind warned me that this didn’t make any sense. Why were they letting me through now?

A second later I realized why my neighbors had all taken three or four steps back. It wasn’t a sudden change of heart.

A gun went in my face.

I froze, stared down its barrel.

On the other side of that larger-than-life, government-issue weapon stood Officer Keith Whitmire. Hate burned in his big brown eyes. He wore his khaki uniform shirt, but the right sleeve had been ripped away completely up to his shoulder. Gauze bandages were wrapped around his burned forearm from his wrist all the way up past to his elbow. A portion of his face had initially been bandaged as well, but at some point those dressings had been ripped away. An ugly pink rash of busted blisters glistened along his lower jaw and down the left side of his neck.

“Lay your gun on the ground,” he said. “Do it slowly.”

To my damaged eardrums, the cop’s voice sounded as if it came to me from behind a closed door.

“I never wanted to hurt anyone,” I told him. “It was self-defense. You made me do this… you all made me do this.”

“Andrew Holland, you are under arrest for the murders of Ben Souther, Sal Friedman, and Donna Dunaway. Now, I’m gonna count to three, you piece of shit, and if you don’t drop the gun I will fucking drop you!”

“P-please,” I said.

He cocked the hammer. Took a step toward me.

A drop of sweat trickled down his unburned temple, caught in his sideburns.

I could see his big finger already starting to squeeze back on the trigger…

The next second stretched out into infinity. Inexplicably, I found myself thinking of a fact I had learned while researching firearms for one of my novels: it only takes about five-and-a-half pounds of pressure to fire the types of handguns carried by most law enforcement personnel.

My neighbors had won. Their bloodlust would at last be appeased.

I hoped they were fucking happy.

I swallowed once. Braced myself. Knew without a doubt that I was going to die.

I whispered a prayer for Samantha.

. . . and suddenly she was upon him.

A yellow-and-pink blur in my peripheral vision, and before I knew what was happening my daughter leapt onto Officer Keith. She bit down on his burned wrist, on the hand that held his gun, so hard I saw blood dripping from her chin, staining the front of her blouse.

He howled at the heavens as Sam bit deeper and deeper. He dropped his pistol.

“You… little… bitch!” he bellowed, once she had lost the element of surprise.

He shoved my daughter away. She crashed into the side of Jason’s Liberty.

“Leave my Daddy alone!” Although it still sounded as if it came from miles away, Sam’s wail was even higher-pitched than the shrill ringing that filled my eardrums.

His face pale, his arm spurting blood, Officer Keith faltered. He nearly fell, but caught himself. With his uninjured hand, he reached for his gun in the grass at his feet.

I stepped forward, slammed the butt of my pistol into the bridge of his nose.

His hands covered his face. He stumbled backward, taking out several more of my attackers behind him. In a crazy jumble of limbs, they collapsed onto the lawn.

Whitmire tried to stand, wobbled, but fell on his ass again.

I didn’t waste a second. I snatched his gun off the ground, reared back, and threw it as far as I could. Toward Donna Dunaway’s yard on the other side of the street.

Then I did the same with my weapon.

Perhaps it was a stupid move. But I didn’t have time to think about it. I just knew that I didn’t want anyone else to die by my hands. At the same time, I could not afford for either gun to end up in my neighbors’ possession before Sam and I could make our escape.

With my hands free now, I scooped my daughter into my arms. With a desperate roar, I heaved her into the passenger seat.

“Go! Go! Go!”

I leapt into the vehicle after her, slammed the door, crushing several of my neighbors’ fingers in the process.

The mob banged on the Liberty’s roof and hood, rocking the SUV so violently I feared they might tip it over. Their snarling faces pressed against the windows, smearing blood and sweat and saliva across the glass.

“Go, Jason, go!”

The WE STILL PRAY air freshener dangling from the vehicle’s rear-view mirror danced to and fro beneath the horde’s fury.

“I can’t see anything,” Jason stammered. “They’re all… I can’t—”

The back window exploded. The roof crumpled inward.

Finally, Jason stomped on the gas. We shot out of the driveway in reverse.

My neighbors’ bodies thudded and scraped against the sides of the vehicle and its undercarriage. The Liberty jerked to a stop in the street, and we tilted to the right, hard. I winced, braced myself against the door. We had rolled over something big and bulky behind us, I realized. It was not the curb. I felt it give a little beneath the driver’s-side rear tire as Jason slammed the SUV into Drive.

A second or two of hesitation, as that back wheel slid in something wet, trying to find purchase… and then we were off.

Bile rose in the back of my throat. I swallowed it back down.

Samantha sobbed between us as we careened down Poinsettia Lane. Her chin dug into my wound as she wept, and with every frantic beat of my heart fresh blood spurted from the hole in my chest, staining her golden hair bright red. But at this point I barely felt my injuries at all.

“It’s okay, baby,” I wheezed, holding Sam tightly in the crook of one arm. “Shh. It’s gonna be okay, honey. I p-promise…”

I did not know if I said it to reassure my daughter, or myself. Either way, I wasn’t convinced.

At some point during the chaos, Jason had bumped the controls for the Liberty’s windshield wipers. They swish-kathump-swish-kathump-swish-kathumped madly, back and forth in front of our faces. Not that I could hear them.

I shuddered, clutched Sam to my chest tighter than ever.

I noticed Jason’s lips were moving as he maneuvered the Liberty through the street. His voice was an incomprehensible buzz within my damaged eardrums.

“I can’t hear you,” I said.

He took his eyes off the road for just a second, glanced down at Sam.

“This was about those little girls, wasn’t it?” he yelled. “The one you found, and the one near the bookstore in town?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It was.”

He shook his head. “But… no… Andy, that doesn’t make any sense!”

I watched my neighbors grow smaller and smaller in my passenger-side mirror. They sprinted after us, shambling down Poinsettia Lane in our wake, trying their damnedest to keep up. A few of them even threw their weapons at us, though the missiles fell far short of their target.

“You can say that again,” I mumbled. “It hasn’t made sense for a while now…”

“That’s not what I meant,” Jason said. “You… you haven’t heard?”

“Heard what?”

In a voice that sounded as if it came to me from underwater, or from a television set with the volume turned as low as it would go, Jason explained, “They got him, Andy. They caught the guy who did it.”

My eyes grew impossibly wide. “What?”

“The police arrested him earlier today. Over on the Lewiston Turnpike. He was a drifter, some sicko from out of town.”

I could only stare at him, my heart pounding frantically in my chest.

“They got him. It’s been all over the news.”

My mouth hung open.

“My God, Andy… your neighbors knew. They knew it wasn’t you. They knew, but did they even care?”

Just before my neighborhood receded in the distance entirely, I glanced into the mirror one last time.

I was quite sure I saw smoke.

Thick, black smoke, billowing from my ravaged home like exorcised demons taking flight into the evening air.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Ten minutes ago I killed three of my neighbors.

Perhaps I should feel something—disgust, remorse for what I have done. But for now I am only numb.

Hot blood drips into my eyes. Some of it is mine, but not all of it.

“Drive faster,” I tell the man behind the wheel. I can barely hear my own voice above the shrill ringing in my ears.

I cough, tasting cold steel and bitter bile, and something ricochets off the dashboard, into my lap. Several somethings: small, off-white, speckled with dark crimson and trailing meaty pink tails…

Two of my front teeth. And the jagged splinter of a third.

“Faster,” I start to weep. “P-please…”

I peer down at the hole in my chest. It seems to pucker up and grin at me, like a cruel alien mouth dribbling gore.

My tears burn like acid through the grit upon my face.

“For Christ’s sake, don’t stop for anything…”

***

Ten minutes ago I killed three of my neighbors.

Four, if you count the baby.

EPILOGUE

Looking back on everything that happened, I can’t help but think about all I have lost.

And I wonder what happens next.

***

Where do I go from here?

Could I ever return to the house at 217 Poinsettia Lane? Do I dare venture within a hundred miles of that godforsaken neighborhood again, for as long as I live?

I know the answers to those questions.

It is another, more daunting quandary which shall torment me for days to come…

***

Will I ever write again?

***

If so—if I do somehow find the strength to continue on with the very livelihood that almost killed me—shall I be forced to abandon the genre I have adored since I was old enough to read?

After all, I have learned during these last few weeks that there are so many dark things in this world, things infinitely more terrifying than the vampires, werewolves, and restless spirits from beyond the grave I used to write about.

I have experienced real horror.

I have known true evil.

Its name is human nature.

***

Perhaps I will never write another horror novel. At this point, I do not know.

Then again…

One last tale of terror might be the catharsis I need to get me through this.

To prevent what happened on Poinsettia Lane from driving me insane.

***

Should I change the names to protect the innocent, I wonder? To protect the guilty?

Maybe. Maybe not. At this point, does it even matter?

I do know this, however…

Despite all of their efforts, they have not silenced me.

***

So…

I will tell the world what came to pass, in my once-quiet neighborhood. I will prove to those who believe such a thing could never happen here that a seemingly normal street in a picture-perfect town populated by people who appear harmless and benevolent… can sometimes be the most frightening place of all.

This is where darkness lives. Where monsters are bred.

Monsters no less human than you and I.

***

I know now that I must tell my tale.

It shall be a true story. Every word of it.

This one I will dedicate to Norman. To Karen. To little Rebecca Lanning. To that second murdered child, whose body was used then discarded in a filthy back alley behind the Haunted Planet Book Shoppe.

And I will dedicate it to myself… because a part of me died on Poinsettia Lane as well.

I will write it all down. Soon.

I will document my ordeal.

And its title shall be: ANIMOSITY.

THE END