Author: Tim Waggoner
Date: 2016-09-24 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction; Horror
Description: For Joan Lantz, it starts with a dream of a death-cult’s mass suicide in the jungle of Suriname thirty years ago, followed by the discovery of a hidden basement in her new house, where heavy metal music echoes on humid tropical air. For Kevin Benecke, long-suffering employee of a mysterious organization known simply as Maintenance, it starts with the violent death of his co-worker at the hands of a madman who tells him, The Big Dark is coming for you. Long-dead cult leader and former rock star Mark Maegarr has returned from beyond the grave, and Joan and Kevin have front-row seats to his apoca
Publisher: Darkfuse

Table of Contents

EAT THE NIGHT

Connect With Us

Check out DarkFuse Magazine Online

Other Books by Author

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

About the Author

About the Publisher

EAT THE NIGHT

Tim Waggoner

First Edition

Eat the Night © 2016 by Tim Waggoner

All Rights Reserved.

A DarkFuse Release
www.darkfuse.com

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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OTHER BOOKS BY AUTHOR

Broken Shadows

The Last Mile

The Men Upstairs

The Winter Box

This one’s for Jonathan Janz—a hell of a writer
and an even better friend.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Special thanks to Shane Staley, Dave Thomas,
and my agent, Cherry Weiner.

CHAPTER 1

She can’t see anything at first, but she can feel, and what she feels is humidity so thick and heavy—so oppressive—that it’s like a wet woolen blanket draped over her naked body, its weight the palm of a giant hand pressing her toward the earth. Next, she hears something, a loud click followed by an electronic humming sound, and then noise blasts all around her. It’s so loud that it takes her a moment to recognize it as music. Dissonant, on the verge of being atonal, but with a driving beat that slices to the core of her being, a blade of sound that cuts more deeply and efficiently than one forged of metal ever could. Guitars, bass, drums, and then a voice. The words are sometimes growled, screamed, whispered, or shouted, but never simply spoken. Maegarr is too much of an artist for that.

Gonna walk away from the light of day

Roam among the darkest stars

Find a place where Nothing is right

When we get there, we’re gonna—Eat the Night!

Eat the night, eat the night, eat the night, gonna—Eat the Night!

Everything we thought we knew

Meaningless, never true

Feast is famine, dark is light

Forever hungry

Eat the Night!

Eat the night, eat the night, eat the night, we’re gonna—Eat the Night!

Her body sways to the beat, her hips gyrating, and the heat and humidity no longer feel so oppressive. They’re freeing, purifying, like she’s inside a furnace and the flames are burning away her imperfections, erasing all the meaningless, mundane parts of her—and there are so many of those, aren’t there? She’s being perfected. Made ready.

It’s glorious.

She realizes then that the reason she can’t see is that her eyes are closed. So she opens them.

The light from the torches strikes her eyes first. Several dozen of them ring the Pavilion, sitting atop wooden poles driven into the ground. The light isn’t comprised of yellows, reds, and oranges, but rather greens, blues, and whites. These strange flames give off no heat. It’s coldfire, and it’s mesmerizing. Beyond the flames are dark silhouettes of Placidity’s buildings, simple one-story structures the Congregation assembled with the labor of their own hands and baptized with their sweat—and sometimes their blood. Past the buildings are the larger silhouettes of trees, and above it all the stars, pinpoints of light clear and sharp, like shards of sharp-edged glass.

The Pavilion is located in the exact center of Placidity, and it consists of rows of plain wooden benches—they’re too simple to be called pews—and covered by a roof held up with vertical beams placed at periodic intervals. It reminds her of the picnic shelter near her house when she was growing up. Except this one is much larger. The Congregation numbers over three hundred strong, and as huge as the shelter is, a number of people have to stand or sit on the ground. At the front of the Pavilion is a platform upon which a pair of speakers rest. They’re big damn things, each nearly six feet tall, and the music thunders from them, making the entire platform vibrate. Off to the side is a table where Nathan sits before a reel-to-reel tape recorder and mixing board. Nathan always runs sound for Maegarr, and he’s very proud of his position in the Congregation. No one is jealous of him, though. Such emotions have no place in the Congregation’s hearts.

Everyone is screaming along to the music now, fists raised in the air, heads nodding in time to the beat.

Eat the night, eat the night…

Everyone is naked. Men, women, children, young, old. Some are so excited that they’re masturbating, while others are clustered together in various configurations, fucking furiously. No one pays them any mind. Tonight’s a special night, the most special, and everyone is free to celebrate it however they wish. Many of the Congregation are drunk, high, or both, and some bleed from a multitude of wounds, many of which are self-inflicted. She has done nothing to interfere with her senses, though. She doesn’t begrudge her brothers’ and sisters’ choices, but she wishes to meet the Moment with a clear mind as much, if not more, than a joyous heart.

The song—once a Top Ten hit for Maegarr—is two-thirds of the way over before he arrives. She knows that he simply steps forward from the darkness behind the platform, but it appears that he emerges from it, as if a line appears in the night to create an opening through which he slips. The Congregation goes wild when they see him, laughing, shouting, crying, calling out words of love and chanting, “The Moment has come, the Moment has come!”

Maegarr raises his hands high above his head, and the Congregation falls immediately silent, with the exception of those so caught up in their sexual exertions that they’re unaware of anything going on around them. Maegarr doesn’t do or say anything, but those closest to the ones determined to finish their fucking fall upon them, pulling them apart, hitting and kicking them until their attention returns to the here and now. Those who aren’t unconscious, that is.

Maegarr continues to hold his hands high for several more measures, then he lowers them slowly, and in response, Nathan decreases the music’s volume until it cuts out completely. There’s a soft ka-chunk as he presses the button to stop the tape. Maegarr shoots him a quick glare, but then he looks out upon the Congregation and smiles.

Maegarr isn’t a particularly impressive-looking man. He’s not tall, and he has something of a potbelly. He’s in his forties, and although he has long ivory-white hair and a full salt-and-pepper beard, his head is bald and covered with sweat. The greenish blue light from the coldfire torches make his skin look like marble, as if he’s a statue come to life, or perhaps a cartoon spirit, painted in strange hues to suggest an unearthly appearance. Maegarr the Friendly Ghost. Even though it’s nighttime, he wears a pair of aviator sunglasses, and although the Congregation stands before him naked, he wears an oversized Hawaiian shirt, cutoff jeans, and sandals. But despite his physical appearance—or perhaps in an odd way, partially because of it—he exudes a magnetism that draws every eye toward him. And it’s not because he’s standing before a group of devoted followers. It happens to anyone in his presence, even those who hate him. Especially them. She knows, because she’s been with Maegarr since the beginning, and she’s witnessed it happen time and again. That magnetism made him a star, and it made him a leader. And tonight it’s going to make him a god, or at least the next best thing.

She stands in the front row, along with his other companions and their children. She’s close enough to smell the sharp tang of his sweat, combined with a sweet-sour stink like gangrenous flesh. She knows it’s a smell that would revolt most people, but it makes her wet, so much so that she can feel moisture running down the insides of her thighs.

In the center of the platform is a podium with a microphone attached. On the front of the podium is a circle crudely rendered in black paint, and on top rests a large, open leather-bound book, its pages yellowed, edges warped and torn. The air is dead—no wind, not even a hint of a breeze—and yet the edges of the pages ripple gently, like the fronds of undersea plants stirred by invisible currents. Maegarr walks over to the podium, removes the mike from its holder, and then steps to the platform’s edge. He doesn’t like to address the Congregation from behind the podium, doesn’t want anything to come between him and his brothers and sisters when they talk.

“Tonight is the night, my friends.“ A grin splits his beard. “At last.”

A cheer goes up at his words, and he smiles tolerantly while waiting for it to subside. It takes several minutes for the Congregation to quiet, but when they do, he continues speaking in a relaxed, almost conversational tone. His voice echoes from the speakers, which add an electronic hum to his words and make them even more hypnotic.

“It’s been a long time coming, hasn’t it? And I don’t mind telling you that I’m as nervous as I was when I played my first gig at Jenny Laure’s sweet-sixteen birthday party. It was just me and an old six-string back then, singing to a bunch of teenage girls. But I was so scared, I nearly pissed myself. Good thing I didn’t, or else Jenny might not have given me a blow job later down in her parents’ basement.”

The Congregation laughs. A man in the back shouts, “I’ll give you one right now, Mark!” which prompts more laughter. And no one laughs harder than Maegarr.

“If we had the time, I’d take you up on the offer, Jim!” He grows serious then. “But we’re not here to have fun tonight, are we? No, we have work to attend to. Important work. Sacred. Work that’s going to change everything.”

Now that the music is off, she can hear an almost metallic clack-clack-clack coming from all around them, providing accompaniment to Maegarr’s words. And although she can’t see anything beyond the torchlight, she senses movement among the trees, as if things—a great many of them—are moving closer, eager to bear witness to whatever is to come.

The men are all erect, even most of the boys, and the women’s pubic hair glistens with moisture in the coldfire light. Many of the Congregation touch themselves and moan with longing as Maegarr speaks.

“It’s been a long, hard road, no denying that, and we’ve had to make a lot of sacrifices along the way, haven’t we? A lot of good people aren’t here with us tonight.” He pauses and his voice grows colder. “Some not-so-good people, too.”

A few nervous chuckles at this, but most remain silent.

His gaze slides across those standing in the front row, and for an instant his eyes seem to linger on her before moving on. A cold pit yawns wide inside her, and she tries to tell herself it’s just her imagination, that he wasn’t singling her out. But she knows he was.

“There’s a lot more I can say, and so many people I should thank for helping us reach this moment, but we need to get on with the show, don’t we? I’ve played in front of enough audiences to know that it’s rude to keep people waiting. Or as my mother used to say, ‘Shit or get off the pot.’”

Laughter, not so nervous this time. She doesn’t laugh, though. Her throat is too dry and tight, and she’s starting to tremble. She hopes no one will notice, hopes he won’t. But of course he will. He notices everything.

The things from the trees sidle closer, as if drawn by the power in Maegarr’s voice. The strange clacking grows louder, and Nathan turns up the speakers’ volume so Maegarr can be heard over the sound.

“There’s just one thing we have to do first,” he says.

He smiles, but his eyes are cold as a glacier’s heart—and they’re focused directly on her, just as she feared.

Two of her fellow consorts—the ones standing on either side of her—take hold of her arms and pull her forward. She realizes that this was prearranged, and even though this shouldn’t surprise her, it does. More than that, it hurts. Monica and Brian: these two are her lovers, her brother and sister, her family…

Not anymore, she realizes. Maybe they never were.

She doesn’t resist—she knows there’s no point—but she won’t do anything to help them. She lets herself fall limp, and Monica and Brian are forced to drag her to the platform’s edge. Maegarr crouches down before her so that they’re nearly face-to-face. He’s still holding the mike, of course. He was lying when he talked about getting the show going. For Mark Maegarr, the show truly began when his mother squeezed him out from between her legs, and it hasn’t stopped since.

He reaches forward and brushes a lock of sweat-matted hair from her forehead. She knows the gesture is a calculated one, performed for the benefit of his audience, but her body still shivers at his touch.

“Why did you do it, Debbie?” His voice is a sorrow-laden whisper, but thanks to the speakers, it echoes through the Pavilion like a shout.

The things in the night draw closer, and she thinks she can make out their shapes now, darkness against darkness. The clack-clack-clack rises in pitch, as if the insects surrounding the Pavilion are becoming excited. She feels the force of Maegarr’s personality behind his words, feels pressure building inside her head. She wants to answer him, must answer him. But she draws her lower lip between her teeth and bites down hard. Pain flares, followed by the hot gush of blood. She spits into his face, and red droplets cling thick and heavy to his beard, stipple the lens of his sunglasses.

Slowly, Maegarr’s own lips draw back from his teeth, the expression more snarl than smile.

“If that’s the way you want it…” He looks at her one last time, and in the depths of his eyes, she sees twin circles of light spiraling slowly around great seas of darkness. Then he blinks, and the dual visions are gone. He stands and walks away from the platform’s edge and to the podium. He places the microphone back in its holder and lays a hand atop the open book. As if in response to his touch, the pages ripple even more.

“How many nights have I stood here and read to you from this book, my loves?” He slides his fingers across a page, and the book seems to writhe with pleasure. “And with each page I read, another mask concealing the true nature of reality fell away, allowing us to see.”

As if the word see is a cue, the Congregation begins chanting.

“To see is to know. To know is to die. To die is to become nothing, and Nothing is Everything.”

Without realizing it, Debbie mouths the words, along with the others, blood dripping from her wounded lips onto her breasts.

Maegarr continues. “Tonight, we’ve reached the final page, and once I read it, the last mask will be removed. But before I start, we have our own final masks to remove, don’t we?”

Debbie’s hands twitch as she tries to reach for her face, but Monica and Brian hold her arms down, preventing her. Nathan turns on the reel-to-reel and “Eat the Night” starts blasting once more at top volume.

“I didn’t do anything wrong!” Debbie shouts, the blood filling her mouth and her swelling lower lip making her hard to understand. “You can’t do this to me!”

She’s sure Maegarr hears her, even over the sound of his own recorded voice screaming from the speakers. But his only reply is to motion for her captors to turn her around to face the rest of the Congregation. All of them have reached up to touch their foreheads, fingernails digging into the thin layer of skin over bone. Fingers dig into flesh, and lines of blood begin to trickle down skin. Men, women, and children grimace as they pull and tug. More blood flows, and even though the pounding drumbeat and chain saw guitars of “Eat the Night” have drowned out all other sounds—such as the strange insectine clacking and the rustle of grass as dark shapes continue edging closer to the Pavilion—Debbie thinks she can hear the moist sucking sound of skin peeling away from muscle accompanied by nearly orgasmic moans of agony. The skin comes off far more easily than it should, but the Congregation has spent years preparing for this moment, and soon everyone clutches sagging scraps of flesh, their faces now red wet ruins. They’re supposed to cast their “masks” aside now, drop them to the ground as if they’re nothing more than trash. But they continue holding on to their once-faces, and Debbie knows something’s wrong.

Nathan has removed his mask as well. He lays it on the soundboard table, then comes over to stand behind Debbie, Monica, and Brian. He takes hold of both her arms and pulls them back to prevent her being able to reach her own face. Brian and Monica are now free to remove their own false faces, which they now do. But they too hold on to their flesh-masks instead of discarding them.

Maegarr hasn’t removed his face, though. He’s their leader, and the rules don’t apply to him. Still standing at the podium, he leans forward and speaks into the microphone. “Eat the Night” should have obliterated his words, but Debbie hears them as clearly as if the Pavilion were completely silent and he spoke them directly into her ear.

“You’ve been deceitful, Debbie. You’re nothing but masks, one over another.”

She can’t turn to look at him, but she can hear the smile in his voice.

“We’ve decided to give you a going-away present,” he says, “and since you’re so fond of masks…”

The couple steps forward, and Monica shoves her detached face toward Debbie’s mouth. Debbie tries to turn away, but Nathan releases her arms, grabs hold of her head from behind, and forces her to her knees. He then inserts blood-smeared fingers between her teeth and pries her mouth open. Monica grins, her teeth a startling slash of white in her red face, and jams her no-longer-wanted mask into Debbie’s mouth. She tastes sweat-salt and blood-tang, and then Monica pushes and shoves the hideously slick, smooth flesh down Debbie’s throat. Debbie struggles to breathe, and her abdominal muscles cramp as her body tries to reject what is being forced into it. Brian steps forward then and does the same, shoving Monica’s flesh farther down Debbie’s gullet as he adds his.

Debbie’s lungs scream for air, and her throat burns as if it’s being torn apart from within. She prays that this will be over soon, even if it means her death, but when she sees the rest of the Congregation start moving forward, forming a line as they come, she knows her prayer is destined to go unanswered.

* * *

“Joan! Wake up!”

Someone was shaking her, and her first reaction was to try and push whoever it was away. It was dark, and she couldn’t see the person, and that only added to her terror. But he—the person was bigger and stronger and just felt like a he—grabbed hold of her wrists and prevented her from struggling. She attempted to draw a breath, but her throat felt as if it were closed shut, and she couldn’t draw in any air. She remembered the feeling of blood-slick flesh being crammed into her mouth, and she fought even harder to pull free from the man holding her wrists.

“You’re having an asthma attack! You need your inhaler!”

She kneed him in the stomach before she realized what he’d said. He made an oomph! sound, but she stopped struggling, and he let go of her wrists and reached over her and pulled open her nightstand drawer. She heard him fumble around for a moment, and then he withdrew his hand. He pressed the plastic inhaler into her right hand, and she sat up, put it in her mouth, and took a hit. She needed two more before her throat and lungs relaxed and she was able to breathe freely again. As always, the albuterol made her jittery and she began shaking.

Jon slid his arms around her and pulled her close. She knew he was only trying to comfort her, but she didn’t like to be touched when she was upset. They’d been married for six years—Jon and Joan, isn’t that so cute?—and they’d dated for several years before that. And in all that time, he’d never been able to remember not to touch her until she was ready. She suspected he was more interested in playing the role of a supportive, loving spouse—or at least his interpretation of it—than in actually giving her what she needed at the moment. Still, she did her best to relax against him, and if her body remained a little stiff, he’d put it down to her still being upset, if he noticed at all.

“Bad dream?” he asked.

What was your first clue? “Yes.”

“Was it—”

“No. Something different. Weird. I don’t remember much.” This part was a lie. She remembered every detail, but she didn’t feel like talking about it. Not yet, anyway. She wanted to process it first. Besides, if she told Jon, he’d probably start worrying that she was suppressing something and he’d urge her to speak to a psychologist. She could almost hear him. You’re a drug-dependency counselor. You should know all kinds of shrinks to talk to. Her husband was a typical Mr. Fix-It in every way. He might’ve worked as the manager of a home-improvement store, but he saw himself as able to fix—or at least give others advice on how to fix—anything.

He started stroking her hair. It was a sweet gesture, but her hair was long and fine, and his fingers often snagged and snarled, causing her to wince in pain. At least with the light off, he wouldn’t see the face she’d make.

“Everything’s okay now.” He spoke in a near-whisper as he always did whenever they were in bed. They had no children and were alone in the house, but it didn’t matter to Jon. Nighttime was always quiet time to him. “It was only a dream.”

And a kick to the nuts might not kill you, but it still hurts like hell, she thought.

“Only a dream,” he repeated, his voice softer, the words less distinct. His breathing began to slow and deepen, and his hand slowed. Soon the hair-stroking stopped and she felt him become a dead weight beside her. Jon had the enviable ability to fall asleep almost instantly, even after being woken in the middle of the night by her thrashing beside him. She hated him a little right then.

She waited a few minutes to make sure he was finally asleep before slipping out of his arms and leaving the bed. She slept in her panties and an oversized T-shirt, but although the bedroom air was chilly, she didn’t bother putting on her robe or slippers. Instead she padded across the carpeted floor, checked the window to make sure it was locked, then opened the door as quietly as she could. She stepped into the hallway, then closed the door gently behind her. The hallway was dark, and she kept a hand on the wall to guide her as she walked. When she reached the hall bathroom, she went inside and flipped on the light. The sudden burst of illumination forced her to close her eyes. Why did she always forget to close them before turning on the light? She closed the door, peed, flushed, washed her hands, and then returned to the hall and headed for the kitchen. She still felt jittery from the albuterol, but she was no longer shaking, so that was something. Unlike Jon, she had a hard time going back to sleep once she awakened—especially if she took a hit from her inhaler. There was no point in even trying. She’d be up for hours.

She always left the stove light on at night, and although it wasn’t very bright, she had no trouble seeing. She went to the Keurig and turned it on, and while she waited for it to warm up, she checked the time on the microwave clock. 3:48. Only two hours and change before she was due to get up and start getting ready for work. She supposed it could’ve been worse. She could’ve woken even earlier.

When the Keurig was ready, she took a mug from the cupboard, put it in the machine, then inserted a cup of decaf coffee—no way she was going to have regular as jittery as she already was—and started it brewing. She’d left her phone in the bedroom, so she couldn’t check her email or Facebook. She didn’t feel like going back to the bedroom to get it, though. She wasn’t worried about waking Jon. He’d just go right back to sleep if she did. She didn’t want to return to the bedroom because—and she knew this was silly—it was the place where she’d had the dream. It wasn’t like she thought the bedroom was cursed or anything. She wasn’t superstitious. She just wanted to dissociate herself from the dream, and anything related to it, as much as possible. While the coffee finished brewing, she checked the back door and found it locked, just as it should be. She checked the window over the kitchen sink and found it the same. She gazed out the window. Moonlight made their neatly trimmed backyard seem to glow, and the leaves that had already started to fall from the old elm tree looked like black smudges of shadow on the ground.

When the coffee was done, she tossed the used cup into the trash receptacle, then picked up the hot mug without adding anything to it. The kitchen connected to the dining room, which in turn opened onto the sunporch. She headed to the double doors that opened onto the porch, and checked to make sure they were locked. They were. She flicked the light switch on the wall and illumination flooded the sunporch, which, like most of the rest of the house, was empty. She saw that the dead bolt over its outside door was engaged, then turned the light off. She then returned to the kitchen and headed back into the hallway. She walked into the foyer and checked the front door (locked), then she checked the windows in the two empty bedrooms (locked). She then went into the living room, pushed back the curtain over the picture window, checked to make sure it was also locked, and then spent a couple moments gazing out at the front yard, the street, and the neighbors’ houses opposite them. The front yard was larger than the back, but there were few leaves in it. It was early September, and the Realtor who had sold them this place had said that, while the number of trees in the neighborhood added to its charm, everyone’s yards were covered with leaves by late fall. Joan didn’t care, though. It fact, she was looking forward to it. This was the first house she’d had since…well, just since—not counting foster homes—and this was the first one that was really hers. And Jon’s, of course. No matter what chores she would find herself doing as a homeowner, she’d do them gladly.

The living room was empty, except for the carpet the previous owners had put down, a bland beige that she intended to replace as soon as possible. She and Jon had moved in only a couple weeks ago, and the contents of their one-bedroom apartment had been divvied up between the master bedroom, the family room, and the kitchen. And none of those rooms were full. Two of the three bedrooms were as empty as the living room, and there were no photographs or art on the bare walls.

One step at a time, she told herself. They had a house. They could take their time finishing and decorating it.

She took a sip of her black coffee, and the hot liquid burned pleasantly on the way to her stomach. She headed into the family room to check the door to the garage and the windows—all locked, just as she’d left them before going to bed. She then sat on the threadbare couch that she and Jon had picked up at a secondhand store when they’d first moved in together years ago. The springs were shot and it was uncomfortable, but at least it was familiar, and that’s what she needed right then. She reached up to turn on the floor lamp that sat behind the couch, then she settled in as best she could and sipped her coffee.

She was glad Jon hadn’t been awake to see her go through her ritual of checking to make sure the doors and windows were locked. He’d tease her about being OCD, but if checking the locks really were a compulsion, wouldn’t she have raced through the house the moment she got up, checking all the doors and windows to make sure they were locked? But she took her time about it. Sure, she had to make herself go slow, but she could, and that was the point. She knew that despite Jon telling her that he understood her need to check the locks, in truth, her habit irritated him. But that was tough shit as far as she was concerned. Let him be irritated. If he’d experienced what she had…

She didn’t want to think about that any more than she wanted to think about the dream, so she turned on the television—a flat screen mounted to the wall—muted the volume, and skimmed the channel guide to see if anything interesting was on cable. But all she found was late-night dreck: boring old movies, stupid reality shows, and infomercials. She turned the TV off and spent the next several minutes sipping coffee and trying not to think.

* * *

When she first heard the noise, she told herself that it was her imagination. She was paranoid enough normally, but after that horrible dream, she was way on edge. And this wouldn’t be the first time she’d thought she’d heard noises that weren’t real. But then she heard it again. A dull thump, like the sound of a fist pounding against a door.

Nausea flooded her gut and a warm flush spread over her body. She recognized the signs of a panic attack—she’d had enough of them over the years—and she steeled herself against the fear. She couldn’t afford to let it get worse. Panic was like a fire, and if left to rage out of control, it could become crippling.

She heard the thump again, louder this time.

Doing her best to keep her breathing slow and even, she leaned forward, placed her mug on the coffee table, and rose from the couch. Her pulse thundered in her ears, and her equilibrium was off. Concentrating on maintaining her balance, she started walking in the direction the noise had come from. The family room opened onto the dining room—and the sunporch. She returned to the double doors and turned on the porch light. The outer porch door was still locked, and the room was empty. So what—

She heard the thump again. Only it didn’t come from the sunporch. It came from the wall to her right.

She turned to look at the wall. It was a blank, empty space, covered by truly hideous wallpaper with alternating vertical white-and-black stripes. It was the only section of the house that had been wallpapered, as if some previous owner had started the job and abandoned it. Probably realized how butt-ugly the pattern is, she thought.

Her heart still pounded and she still felt dizzy, but her panic was beginning to slowly ebb. So there was an intruder, but it looked like it was the fur-covered, four-legged variety. Could be a squirrel. This was the right time of year for them. Or maybe a raccoon. She hoped not, though. Their realtor had told them about a house she’d taken clients to once that had an entire family of raccoons living in the attic for months. Their accumulated piss and shit had ruined the attic floor to the point where sections of it collapsed into the downstairs. This was her home, and there was no fucking way she would let a bunch of flea-ridden little bastards ruin it. Anger drove away the last of her fear, and she slammed her fist against the ugly wallpaper.

“How do you like it, you furry fucker?”

She struck the wall again, then a third time. Her hand hurt, but she was too angry to give a shit. She was going to hit the wall for a fourth time when she saw that the wallpaper had torn a little. There was now a vertical line roughly four inches long in the paper, close to where she’d struck the wall. She frowned, pried up the paper’s edge so she could get her fingers on it, and pulled. A swatch of wallpaper tore away, revealing not wall, but wood. It took her only a few minutes to pull off enough wallpaper to expose a door. The knob had been removed, and there was no molding.

She stepped back and regarded the door for several moments, half wondering if maybe she’d never really woken from her dream and was still lying in bed asleep. Then she stepped forward, inserted a pair of fingers through the hole where a knob should’ve been, curled them downward, and pulled. The door opened smoothly, no resistance, no squeaking hinges. It was dark on the other side, but she could see a wooden handrail and steps.

“Surprise,” she said. “Looks like we have a basement.”

CHAPTER 2

“Can you hear me, Barry?”

Kevin breathed the words more than spoke them. The comm device built into his glasses was designed to pick up the wearer’s voice, no matter how softly he spoke, and the miniature cameras in the frames transmitted video of everything he saw, making Kevin a walking, talking television studio.

“Loud and clear.”

Barry’s voice issued from the tiny device inserted into Kevin’s left ear. It was so small that most people didn’t notice it, and if they did, they assumed it was a hearing aid.

“Visual?” Kevin asked.

“Online and fine.”

The audio and video feeds were transmitted to Barry back in the van, who recorded it for the Analysts’ later review. Kevin had worked for Maintenance for nearly a decade, but he still felt self-conscious whenever he had the glasses on. Even though Barry was the only one watching and listening at the moment, Kevin couldn’t help thinking about the nameless, faceless Analysts who’d eventually pour over each and every second of footage, judging his every move. He supposed that was the point, at least partially. Had to keep the field guys on their toes, right?

It was chilly tonight, in the low fifties, and he wished he’d put on a jacket before leaving the van. The Department’s uniform—long-sleeved white shirt, black tie, black pants, and black shoes—might be effectively nondescript, but it didn’t provide much in the way of warmth. He wasn’t exactly fat, but he was well padded, and that helped a little. Still, he’d rather have a jacket.

He walked down an unlit sidewalk on a suburban street. Barry was parked a couple streets to the east. It was standard policy not to park Surveillance vans too close to places or persons of interest. Kevin understood the reasons for this, but would it have killed Barry to drop him off closer to the old man’s house? After all, it was four in the morning. Who was awake to see them?

Kevin was in something of a sour mood as he came to the end of the street and turned right into a cul-de-sac. The residents in this part of Ash Creek might not have wanted the garish fluorescence of streetlights glaring throughout the night, but that didn’t prevent them from leaving porch or driveway lights on. So he had no trouble making out his surroundings as he walked, but even if there had been no lights at all, not even moonlight, he would’ve been able to find his way. He was long used to working in darkness. Besides, his glasses had a night-vision function.

The houses in this part of town were larger two-story dwellings, most of which had been built decades ago. Some showed signs of their age—weathered brick, sagging roofs, cracked driveways—but others had been well tended over the years, and if they didn’t look brand-new, they displayed a respectable enough façade to the outside world. Kevin knew that façades didn’t mean shit, though. There was no telling what lay behind a mask until it was removed.

The yards were larger here, and there was more space between houses than in most of the other suburbs in town. The trees—oak and elm, primarily—were tall, with thick trunks and numerous branches. It was still early enough in the season for most of the leaves to still be on, but a scattering had fallen, dotting lawns, driveways, and the sidewalk. Kevin was careful not to step on any as he walked. Sure, everyone was probably asleep, but that was no reason to get sloppy. Sloppy bought you trouble, and trouble got you killed. And while no one who worked for Maintenance feared death—and in fact often looked forward to it—no one wanted to invite it to come any earlier than necessary. It went against everything Maintenance stood for. And all philosophy aside, they were always understaffed and there was too much to be done. The longer one lived, the longer one could be of service.

Flavor to the Feast.

The house that Kevin had been assigned to check out was located at the end of the cul-de-sac. Two stories, salmon-colored brick, black roof, off-white shutters. It had no doubt been quite a handsome place once, but its best years were long behind it. The brick was crumbling, the roof was missing large patches of shingles, and several of the shutters looked like they were in imminent danger of falling off. The concrete driveway was cracked and broken, and the yard lamp was tilted as if it had been knocked off kilter and never righted. The light hadn’t been turned on, or more likely, had burned out long ago and never been replaced. The grass hadn’t been cut in several weeks, and the oak trees in the yard were badly in need of trimming. Branches stretched too close to the house, and in some cases rubbed up against it.

“That’s the place,” Barry said in his ear.

No shit, Kevin thought. But mindful of the Analysts, he only said “Roger.”

His gut gurgled, and he removed a roll of antacids from his pants pocket, popped a couple in his mouth and then, after considering, popped a third. He replaced the roll in his pocket as he began chewing.

“Do you really have to do that in my ear?” Barry asked.

“Sorry,” Kevin mumbled. He chewed hurriedly and swallowed.

Barry sighed, but otherwise didn’t reply.

There were no lights on in the house, at least none he could detect from outside. The neighbors on either side—who were likely less than elated to be living next to this run-down near-hovel—had their porch lights on, but they were dim and did little to illuminate the old man’s yard, almost as if his property resisted any light encroaching on it. Good. That would work to Kevin’s advantage. No need to circle around the neighborhood and approach the house from the rear. He could take the direct approach. When he reached the driveway, he stepped onto it and headed toward the house.

The driveway appeared to be made of concrete, but it felt rubbery under his feet and gave slightly beneath his weight. It was a most unsettling sensation, kind of like trying to walk in an inflatable bouncy house. When he drew near the garage door—off-white paint peeling away from the wooden surface in tiny curls—he veered to the right and stepped into the yard. The grass rose up to his calves, and the blades snagged the fabric of his pants, as if they were covered with tiny thorns. He imagined they were attempting to grab hold of him and retard his progress, and who’s to say they weren’t?

As he moved around to the side of the old man’s house, he felt a familiar thrill of adrenaline surge at the base of his sternum. He wasn’t a voyeur—far from it. Sometimes he wished he had never accepted promotion to Surveyor. But he’d been lying to himself if he didn’t admit that he experienced a certain rush when conducting direct surveillance. It was dancing right up to the edge of danger, but hopefully without encountering any. He much preferred leaving the dangerous stuff for an Intervention Team to handle. Still, sometimes things happened in the field, and he was forced to act, whether he liked it or not. So part of his adrenaline rush was excitement, but a larger part of it was plain old-fashioned fear. This was the reason he ate antacids like they were candy. Maintenance did vital work, the most important work of all, really, and he was proud to be part of it.

Even so, he wished he could trade places with Barry right now.

As he walked around the side of the house, he sensed movement on his left. He froze, sudden beads of sweat dotting his skin. He listened, but he heard nothing. He slowly turned his head to look at the house and found himself facing a side window. He expected to see the old man’s face glaring at him from the other side of the glass, but he saw only a swath of black, which might have been drawn curtains or thick shadows inside the darkened house. Either way, he hadn’t been seen, and that was all that mattered.

“Everything okay?”

Kevin jumped at the sound of Barry’s voice in his ear. He knew Barry could tell he’d been startled by the sudden lurch in the video image he was receiving in the van.

“So far, so good,” Kevin whispered, trying to keep the irritation he felt at himself out of his voice.

“Roger that.” A pause. “You know, if you ever decide to retire, you should think about running track. You’d be great at the high jump.”

Kevin raised his hand in front of his glasses and extended his middle finger.

Barry laughed. “I can’t wait to hear what the Analysts say about that!”

Smiling, Kevin lowered his hand and continued making his way toward the backyard. As he walked, he mentally reviewed what he knew about the old man.

Daniel Harris, eighty-three, retiree, widower, no children. He’d lived in the house for only a couple years. Strange place to retire to, Kevin thought. Usually folks moved to smaller homes in their golden years. Less work to do. None of Harris’s neighbors had seen him for a few weeks, but none had been worried enough about him to stop by and see how he was or call the police and ask them to do a wellness check. According to reports, Harris could be a real prick when the mood struck him, and Kevin doubted any of the old man’s neighbors would miss him if he was lying dead somewhere in his house. But Kevin doubted that was the case. During a routine sweep of the neighborhood, Kevin and Barry had recorded some interesting readings, and after a couple days of surveillance, they had identified Harris’s house as the source of the readings. Research had dug up what they could on the owner, and tonight Kevin and Barry had received the go-ahead to take their surveillance to the next level.

Right now, Kevin’s main goal was to conduct an initial recon of the house, recording video and audio for the Analysts to examine. He’d also write a report detailing his observations and impressions. He would place several outside sensors in the yard, and—provided he saw an opportunity to enter the house without being detected—he carried several miniature ones that he could place inside to allow them to obtain more precise energy readings.

The backyard was even more unkempt than the front. The grass was higher and there were numerous weeds interspersed throughout. The trees here were stunted, twisted things with sparse, sickly leaves. It was as if a token effort had been made to keep the front of the property looking semi-respectable, but the rear had been left to run to ruin. Even if they hadn’t picked up suspicious readings from Harris’s house, Kevin would’ve recognized it as a place of interest. The run-down look of the property was a strong indication, but just because Harris had let his house and yard go didn’t mean much. Lots of people, especially old folks, lived in shitholes created by their own neglect. But there were other unmistakable signs—the air was stale and flat, and breathing it in took an effort. Sound was deadened, especially here in the back, as if the air was too thin and weak to properly conduct it. But for Kevin, the giveaway was the smell, a combination of rotting flowers and sour milk, with a sulfurlike chemical tang hovering around the edges. You learned to recognize the scent of corruption quickly when you worked for Maintenance, and Harris’s property reeked of it.

He was about to inform Barry of the smell when he noticed Harris’s back door was standing wide open. That was unexpected. Had the old man forgotten to close it? Outward corruption was often a sign of inner, and judging by the state of his house and yard, Harris didn’t have too many marbles left. But then again, the old man might retain a certain amount of animal cunning, in which case the open door could be a trap. If during an initial recon a Surveyor noticed something odd or out of the ordinary—ordinary being a relative term given their line of work—they were duty-bound to investigate. On the other hand, they were also supposed to use their discretion. If investigation appeared too risky, Surveyors were directed to withdraw and call for an Intervention Team to deal with the situation.

Kevin stared at the open door. Decisions, decisions…

In the end, Kevin made his choice the same way he usually did when working. What would the Analysts expect him to do? More important, what would they say in their report to Deanna?

He started toward the door.

The dead-flower-sour-milk-and-sulfur smell grew stronger the closer he came to the open doorway, but that was to be expected. There was no light inside, which—unfortunately—was also expected. Darkness was like food and drink to creatures such as Harris had become.

“I’m going in for a quick look-see,” he breathed. “Be ready to call in a team.”

“Roger that,” Barry said. “Be careful.”

When Kevin came within three feet of the doorway, he stopped and popped a couple more antacid tablets into his mouth. Chewing, he entered the house.

The night-vision function of his glasses was limited, and while it worked well enough for him to operate outside the house, it was of little use inside. The darkness within was thick and deep, an almost solid thing that he had to push his way through, as if the structure was filled to the ceiling with inky-black gel. The smell was ten times worse in here than it had been outside, and despite the antacids he’d downed, the stench caused his stomach to roil with nausea. Breathing through his mouth helped, a little.

He stopped in the middle of what he assumed was the kitchen, if the tile under his feet was any indication. He held his breath and listened, trying to ignore the thrumming of his pulse in his ears. He heard nothing, but the air inside the house was even more lifeless than that in the yard. Someone could blow an air horn right next to him, and it was possible he might not hear it.

Time to shed some light on the subject.

He reached into his shirt pocket and removed a penlight. He gripped it in his fist, thumbed the switch to activate it, then held it up. The beam wasn’t especially strong, and it only penetrated a few feet into the darkness, but it was better than nothing. He made a slow sweep of the room, which as he’d surmised, was indeed a kitchen. Cabinet doors sagged on hinges and their paint was cracked and peeling. The floor tile was yellowed and warped, and the sink and faucet displayed signs of corrosion. He’d expected to find piles of filth-encrusted dishes, cups, pots, and pans in the sink, with an army of cockroaches climbing over them. But the sink was empty, the metal bone-dry, as if it hadn’t been used in ages. The counters were covered in a layer of dust, but otherwise they were empty.

He placed a couple sensors in places where they wouldn’t be found, unless someone knew how to conduct an extremely thorough search. He then moved deeper into the house, leaving the kitchen and heading down a short, narrow hallway. The carpet was worn, and the floorboards creaked softly, but the sound was swallowed up as soon as it was made, so he was fairly confident no one inside the house could hear it. Not unless they were close by, that is.

“You getting all this?” he whispered, more to hear Barry’s voice reply than because he felt any real need to check the comm link.

“Yep. Not that there’s been much to see so far.”

Kevin exited the hallway and entered a larger space. A family or living room, he guessed. The darkness was just as thick in here as it had been in the kitchen and hallway, and his penlight wasn’t any more effective. But the shaft of light illuminated a white object at eye level. It was so close that he nearly ran into it, and the sudden sight of it, coupled with the near-collision, caused him to gasp.

“What is that?” Barry asked.

Kevin didn’t reply. The object—at least the part he could see—was rodlike, its surface polished to a fine sheen. It remained steady until he reached out and gently nudged it with his index finger. It swayed then, and he heard a clacking sound.

A chill rippled up his spine, and he stepped back from the object. He searched until he found a wall and then continued to search until he located a light switch. If Harris wasn’t already aware of his presence, he knew he risked alerting the old man by turning on the light. But he had a suspicion of what the object was, and if he was right, the Analysts would want a clear look at it.

He flipped the switch.

Light didn’t flood the room and immediately illuminate it. Instead, the darkness slowly ebbed, as if he were turning a dimmer switch. It took nearly thirty seconds for the light to clear away the last shadowy traces of the dark, but long before that, Kevin was able to get a good look at the object he’d almost walked into, and it was even worse than he’d imagined. He’d guessed the rodlike object was a polished length of bone—a femur, to be precise—and the light revealed he’d been correct. It also revealed that the femur was far from the only bone present. The room was empty of any furnishings, photos, or artwork, but hanging from the ceiling were dozens of other bones. A mixture of large and small, human and animal, connected by a network of wires that held them suspended in space. He thought he recognized a pattern in that arrangement. One of the Oblivion Configurations, maybe, or perhaps the Sigil of Debasement. The Analysts would know for certain.

“You recognize the shape?” he asked Barry.

Silence.

“Barry?”

He reached up and tapped his earpiece. It was possible that the bone sculpture was giving off negative energy that was interfering with his connection to Barry, but he doubted it. Tech Division was careful to shield their toys from such energies. Telling himself there was no reason to worry, he flipped off the light and headed back the way he’d come, using the penlight’s feeble beam to guide him. He intended to return to the yard and see if he could get a clear signal to Barry, but as he stepped into the kitchen, he heard Barry’s voice in his ear.

“Is that you, Kevin? I thought you were still in the—”

His words gave way to an agonizing scream, and Kevin nearly pissed himself. He dropped his penlight and ran out the back door, nearly tripping over his own feet. He ran around the side of the house and into the front yard, lungs heaving, heart pounding. He wasn’t especially fit—too much fast food, too little exercise—but adrenaline flooded his body, and he moved faster than he had in years. The van was parked a couple streets over, and Kevin cut through yards, not caring how much noise he made or if he woke up anyone inside the houses he passed. Barry hadn’t made a sound since that scream, and no matter how many times he shouted Barry’s name, there was no reply.

By the time he reached the van, he was drenched with sweat and his lungs felt like they were on fire. He gulped air, but no matter how much he took in, it didn’t seem to help. He felt dizzy and gray nibbled at the edges of his vision. It would be just his luck to die of a heart attack before he could do anything to help Barry. The Analysts would probably piss themselves laughing over that.

There were no streetlights here either, and the unmarked white van was little more than a shadowy lump next to the curb. But Kevin could make it out well enough with his glasses, and when he went around to the passenger side, he saw that the van’s side door was open. Inside was a cramped work space—a narrow counter upon which several laptop computers sat open. Normally an office chair was positioned in front of the computers, but the chair had been overturned. Barry, who was also dressed in a nondescript Maintenance uniform, lay on the floor of the van, an emaciated naked man straddling his chest. The man, who looked to be in his eighties, had a scraggly white beard and his chest, hands, and arms were covered with blood. Barry’s white shirt was soaked with crimson, and his face…well, he no longer had one. The front of Barry’s head was a wet mask of exposed muscle, his wide staring eyes two startling orbs of white surrounded by red. Kevin was fairly sure that the blood-slick scrap of discarded flesh lying on the floor next to the old man’s bony knees had once served as Barry’s face. Barry still had his scalp, although Harris was busy sawing away at it with a blade that looked to have been fashioned from bone. Runes were carved into the side of the blade, most of which Kevin didn’t recognize.

Harris became aware of Kevin’s presence then and turned to regard him. His hands didn’t pause in their grisly work, though. They continued filleting Barry’s scalp, conducting the procedure with sure, deft motions, as if possessed of their own sensory apparatus.

Harris grinned, displaying a mouth devoid of teeth, gums raw and bleeding. Kevin saw that the man’s penis—a twisted thing that resembled a boar’s corkscrew cock—was erect, the tip glistening with preejaculate.

“You’re the man I saw through the window, aren’t you?”

The old man’s voice was thick and raspy, as if his vocal cords were covered with tumorous growths. His breath stank like an overflowing Dumpster in August heat.

“You two thought you were so clever watching me. But I knew what you were up to.” He lowered his voice, as if imparting a secret. “The bones told me all about you.”

His hands finished their work, and one drew the bone blade away from Barry’s head, while the other gripped the front of his scalp and pulled. Flesh parted from bone with a wet sucking sound. Harris let the scalp fall from his hand and then ran his bloody fingers over the top of Barry’s skull in a sickening caress. He turned away from Kevin and gazed down at what his hands had revealed.

“It’s gorgeous, isn’t it? For the longest time I’ve been looking for the right skull to complete my Formation. I’ve tried over a dozen, but none were suitable. When I saw you going around the side of my house, I thought yours might do, but then I reconsidered. I decided I’d check out your partner’s first, and I’m so glad I did. It’s absolutely perfect!” He frowned. “Of course, I won’t know for certain until I take the head back home and boil it clean, but I have a good feeling about it, I really do.”

He stared at Kevin then, cocking his head to the side as if intrigued, confused, or both.

“The Big Dark’s coming for you, boy. Coming soon.” He inhaled deeply. “I can smell it on you. I’d join you if I could, but I have my little art project to finish. Give my regards to the Vast.”

Harris fell silent then and began cutting into Barry’s neck. He worked with complete concentration, seemingly unconcerned with Kevin’s presence. Perhaps he’d forgotten that Kevin had even existed. Kevin kept his gaze fastened on the old man as he stepped away from the van. He managed to take his phone from his pocket and call for an Intervention Team before hot vomit rushed up his throat. He barely managed to bend over in time to keep from throwing up all over himself. As he stood there, bent over, stomach heaving, he thought he heard the old man humming to himself as he worked.

* * *

Joan was sitting at the kitchen counter, sipping another mug of coffee, her fourth since waking. She’d stuck to decaf, but it hadn’t helped. She was so wired, she felt like electric current buzzed through her veins.

At 6:11 Jon came shuffling into the kitchen. On weekdays he set his phone alarm for six, but he always overslept it. He wore a pair of black shorts and a white T-shirt, both of which were loose on him. He was one of those people who remained naturally thin no matter what they ate, and if Joan could’ve killed him and taken this ability for herself, she’d have been tempted to give it some serious thought. His curly black hair was tousled, but then it always looked that way, regardless of what he did to it. His eyes were barely open as he made his way to the coffeemaker. He didn’t wake easily, and he was usually halfway into his second cup before he started developing real signs of life. Joan normally didn’t say much to him until he’d had the chance to caffeinate himself, but today wasn’t a normal day.

“We have a basement,” she said.

Jon didn’t look her way until he’d started his coffee brewing.

“Wha?” His eyes weren’t any more open than before, and his speech was barely intelligible. But she’d waited long enough for him to get up and she wasn’t going to wait any longer.

“We have a basement,” she repeated.

For several seconds Jon looked at her, the only sound the motorized hum of the Keurig as it pissed coffee into his mug. His eyes opened a bit wider and his voice became clearer, although his words were still fuzzy around the edges.

“I’m pretty sure we don’t.”

Joan set down her coffee, slid off the stool, and walked over to her husband. She took hold of his hand and led him to the basement door. She’d left it open with the light on, so Jon could see the wooden stairs angling downward. He looked at her, marginally more awake than he had been a moment ago.

“Where the hell did that come from?”

* * *

“I have to say, it’s the cleanest damn basement I ever saw.”

Joan had to agree with him. The basement was unfinished, the floor and walls bare concrete. There were plain wooden shelves along one wall, fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling, a small sump pump beneath the stairs, and that was it. The floor was clear, as were the shelves. There wasn’t even any dust on them.

“I can’t believe our Realtor didn’t know about this,” Jon said. “Isn’t there some kind of record for houses? Like blueprints filed with the town when they’re built?”

“I have no idea,” Joan said. “Why would anyone hide it? It’s not the biggest basement, but it’s nice enough.”

“Maybe they wanted to make sure no one discovered the bodies.”

Jon considered himself to be a funny guy, and he had a bad habit of making jokes—usually tasteless ones—when he couldn’t think of anything else to say. Normally she ignored them, but after the dream she’d had last night, she could’ve done without the thought that she was standing over hidden graves.

She must’ve done something to indicate her displeasure—pursed her lips, tightened her shoulders—because Jon slipped an arm around her waist and said, “Look at it this way: we just got ourselves a bonus room. And since you found it, you should be the one who gets to decide what to use it for.”

She turned toward him and put her arms around him. He could be a jerk sometimes, but he could also be awfully sweet when he wanted to. She kissed him, but she hadn’t brushed her teeth and her mouth tasted like stale coffee. His lips tightened and then he pulled his face away from hers and gently pushed her back. She knew she shouldn’t take this as a rejection. Jon wasn’t always comfortable with displays of affection, especially when he didn’t initiate them, and any little thing that was wrong—like her mouth not being its freshest—could turn him off. But every time he did something like this, she couldn’t help feeling stung, at least a little. She let go of him and turned away so he wouldn’t see the disappointment and hurt in her eyes. She pretended to look around and survey the basement.

“I have no idea what to do with it,” she said.

“You’ll think of something. We’ll have to get new knobs for the door. And some molding to go around it.”

Jon liked having projects to do around the house. He said it gave him a sense of satisfaction to leave his “mark” on the place, as if he were a dog pissing on a tree.

“Knock yourself out.” She faced him once more and gave him a smile.

He smiled back. “I’ll pick up some supplies at the store after my shift. I’d better go take some measurements.”

He started up the stairs, moving with an eager energy, fully awake now. She wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d bounded up the steps two at a time. She didn’t follow him, though. She remained standing in the middle of the basement, thinking.

Why would someone remove the doorknobs and molding and wallpaper over the door? If whoever it was had really wanted to hide the basement, wouldn’t it have made more sense to plaster over the door? It was like whoever had done it hadn’t wanted to hide the door too well, hadn’t wanted to make it too difficult to find.

Maybe they wanted to make sure no one else found it before you did.

It was a ridiculous thought, but one she couldn’t shake.

She and Jon had bought the house from Wes and Allison Bishop. Allison had worked at the same counseling center as Joan, and they’d become friends. Allison specialized in family counseling, and she and Joan often shared clients. They hadn’t been best friends, but they’d gotten to know each other well during the three years and change they’d worked together. But then Allison’s grandmother died and left her only grandchild a house and twenty acres of property in Indiana. Allison and Wes had considered selling the land, but both of them had grown up in that area—which consisted primarily of farmland—and they’d decided to move there, take up residence in Grandma’s house and start a small farm. Joan knew next to nothing about farming, but she had the impression it was a hell of a tough life and success was far from certain. Still, she’d wished her friend the best of luck.

It wasn’t long after Allison announced she and Wes were moving that she suggested Joan and Jon buy their house from them. Joan and Jon had been over to the Bishops’ several times for dinner, drinks, or just to hang out. It was a cozy little house in a good neighborhood near the high school. And Allison had known how much finally having her own home would mean to Joan. More, she’d known why.

Allison and Wes had made it so easy for them. They gave them the house at the lowest price their bank would let them, and they all used the same Realtor to walk them through the process. On the day before the Bishops left for Indiana, Allison had asked Joan to meet her at a café for coffee. As they sipped their drinks, Allison had told her, I’m so glad you’re taking the house. It’s like it was meant to be. Symmetry, you know? Her voice had been warm, but for a brief instant her eyes had shone with something dark. It passed quickly, and Joan hadn’t been sure she’d really seen it. But she remembered that look now, and the memory made her feel cold inside. Had Allison known about the hidden door? Had she and Wes been the ones who’d wallpapered it over? Had that been the source of the darkness she’d seen in her friend’s gaze?

She hadn’t spoken to Allison in almost a week. Maybe it was time she gave her a call.

The basement had been cool when they’d first come down, but now it felt warmer to her, almost uncomfortably so. And the air felt heavier, more humid, drawing a light sheen of moisture from her skin. A faint miasma of odors came to her: smoke, sweat, bare earth, and stronger than the rest—trees covered with green. But beneath that lay the ripe stink of rot, as if the trees were diseased. She’d smelled these things before, in her dream. In the village the residents had dubbed Placidity. She almost laughed. There’d been nothing placid about that dream. The mingled scents intensified for a few seconds, and then they diminished, but they didn’t fully dissipate.

Imagination, she told herself. Stress. Saying goodbye to Allison, moving into her home, having a bizarre dream, finding a hidden basement… That was a lot for anyone to deal with, and when you tossed in what had happened when she’d been nine…

She slammed the psychic door shut on that thought before it could fully form. The last thing she needed to do was skip down that particular memory lane, have a full-on PTSD panic attack, and end up shivering in bed all day.

Bottom line: the basement was just a basement, her dream was just a dream, and she didn’t have time to stand around down here all day. She needed to get ready for work.

She started up the stairs, but when she was halfway up, she thought she heard almost inaudible music, as if someone across the street had their stereo cranked up as loud as it would play. She could just make out the lyrics.

Eat the night, eat the night…

CHAPTER 3

She didn’t tell Jon about her dream while they were getting ready. He wasn’t the sort of person who enjoyed listening to other people’s dreams. Although now that she thought of it, was anyone? Sure, people found their own dreams endlessly fascinating and loved to talk about them, but listening to others’? Not as much fun. Still, Jon was a good sport about such things, and she knew he’d listen—or at least pretend to—while she related the details about her nocturnal visit to Placidity. But she said nothing to him about it, and she wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was because the dream was too strange to explain easily. Maybe it was because she was still trying to understand it herself. Or maybe she was afraid that Jon would tease her, make one of his lousy jokes.

Talk about losing face!

Maybe she’d feel differently later and tell him. Or maybe she wouldn’t. They both had more important things to do than play amateur dream analysis.

Jon usually was ready to leave before she was, and this morning was no exception. She was doing her makeup in front of the bathroom mirror when he came in wearing a light blue shirt, navy-blue tie, dark blue slacks, and smelling of aftershave. He kissed her on the back of her neck, which sent tingles rippling down her spine, as it always did.

“Love you, sexy,” he said, and then left. A couple moments later she heard the sound of the garage door rising and then shortly after the sound of it lowering. She pictured him backing his Toyota Tacoma pick-up down the driveway, edging too far left because he hadn’t adjusted to the driveway yet, the driver’s-side tires rolling over grass before he backed onto the street. If he kept it up, he’d kill the grass on the side of the driveway and they’d have to reseed.

Today she’d chosen to wear a white blouse, a charcoal-gray jacket and skirt, and black flats. The shoes weren’t especially attractive, but they were comfortable. A pair of small hoop earrings and simple gold chain necklace completed her ensemble, such as it was, and she headed for the kitchen. She grabbed her purse from the counter and made her way to the garage. She walked past the basement door, which yesterday had been nothing but a blank stretch of wall, and although she was tempted to open the door and look down one last time, she resisted. If she didn’t haul ass, she was going to be late, and Joan hated making any of her clients wait. The basement would be there when she got home. It wasn’t going anywhere.

She stepped into the garage, unlocked her Mazda, and climbed in. She thumbed the garage door remote attached to her visor, and then turned on the car’s engine. She’d left the radio on when she’d gotten home from work last night, and it came on now, blasting music at an insanely loud volume. Had she really been listening to it that loud? She quickly reached forward to turn it down but hesitated when she recognized the singer’s voice.

It was Mark Maegarr.

She told herself that it wasn’t possible, that Maegarr had been a character in a dream, someone her subconscious had invented. Whoever this was, he only sounded like Maegarr. The style of music was the same—driving hard rock—and although the song wasn’t “Eat the Night,” it was reminiscent of that tune in a number of ways. She’d never heard this song before, so she sat for a moment, engine idling, and listened to the lyrics. Although the words were growled as much as sung, she had no trouble making them out.

Black Heart

Nothing at the core

Black Heart

A night-dark sea and a bone-covered shore

Black Heart

I feel it inside

Black Heart

What do you have to hide?

She hadn’t heard the song, she was sure of it. So why were her lips forming the words to the lyrics? It was as if her body knew the song even if her mind didn’t. She continued mouthing the words, her hand hovering close to the radio’s off button, and a few moments later the song ended. She waited to see if the DJ was going to identify the song—she was sure it would be called “Black Heart”—as well as the artist. She couldn’t decide if she wanted that to happen of not.

“A classic from Slogeny there.” A woman’s voice.

Joan was surprised. She’d expected the DJ to be a man, probably because of the music. It hadn’t been exactly what she thought of as feminine.

“Too bad about how Maegarr went out, huh?” the woman said. “Not to mention all his followers. But that’s what happens when you go bat-shit crazy, right? At least he left us some kick-ass tunes. And speaking of such, here’s a classic from Nine Inch Nails.”

Joan stabbed the off button before the next song began. What the hell channel had that been? She usually listened to light rock, smooth jazz, or sometimes classical. Anything that helped her relax after what were often stressful days at work. But she didn’t care how the radio had gotten tuned to that station. She was too freaked out by the knowledge that Maegarr was real.

You probably heard his music at one point, and even though your conscious mind forgot about it, your unconscious mind didn’t. And last night he made a guest appearance in your dream. No big deal. She wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that “Eat the Night” was a real song. But what about the rest of what the woman had said? About something happening to Maegarr—something bad, Joan assumed. Something that had also happened to his followers. In her dream Maegarr had followers. The Congregation. And she’d been one of them. Or rather, Debbie had.

She glanced at the dashboard clock and realized she’d been sitting in the garage with the engine running for almost ten minutes. Good thing she’d already opened the garage door. Dying from carbon monoxide poisoning because she’d been daydreaming with the car running would’ve been embarrassing as hell.

She put the Mazda in reverse and began backing out of the garage. She didn’t realize it, but she was humming “Black Heart” under her breath.

* * *

At roughly the same time that Joan Lantz left for work, Kevin sat in the reception area of Maintenance’s Ash Creek office. It was located in a suite next to a dental practice. The building was generic and unremarkable, one of a dozen similar in the office park. There were several unmarked white vans parked out front, and a small sign bolted to the brick wall next to the door, which read simply MAINTENANCE, and in smaller letters beneath it, ASH CREEK DIVISION.

Inside, there was nothing remarkable about the suite, which was exactly the way Maintenance liked it. All the colors were bland and neutral—beige walls, dark green carpet, gray desks and cubicle dividers, black chairs. Everyone wore black shirts or blouses, black pants or skirts. No piercings or tattoos and little makeup or jewelry. None of the staff was particularly good-looking, but none of them were butt-ugly, either. Nondescript was the best way to describe them. People who wouldn’t attract a first glance, let alone a second. Anonymity was one of Maintenance’s chief weapons. It was carefully cultivated and fervently guarded. And Management tended to frown on it when one of their people ended up beheaded by a crazed, naked old man out in the open. Praise Oblivion it hadn’t happened during the daytime, or Kevin’s ass would’ve been well and truly in a sling. As it was, the least he was going to get was a chewing-out. The worst… He didn’t want to think about that.

Maintenance was open around the clock, although they didn’t post office hours anywhere. They weren’t really a business, and they didn’t have an online presence or advertise their phone number. They didn’t advertise at all, as a matter of fact. They didn’t serve customers, and they didn’t want any. They served a Calling. The highest, as far as Kevin was concerned.

The Office Manager—her duties were too numerous and complex for her to be called a receptionist—sat at her desk, her attention fixed on the open laptop before her. Maintenance used portable devices whenever possible, in case the need arose to shut down their location and get the hell out in a hurry. Erika Labianco was rail-thin, skinny to the point of looking unhealthy. While it wasn’t official policy, Maintenance employees were discouraged from overconsumption, and that included food. The fact that Kevin carried a few extra pounds often put him on the receiving end of disapproving looks from his colleagues. No one could accuse Erika of overconsumption, though. She was in her early sixties, her hair a bright silver, and she was so thin, she looked like she suffered from stage-four cancer.

Kevin held a cardboard cup (made of 70% recycled material) filled with black coffee. He took a sip, but it was too hot and burned his tongue. He didn’t care, though. He was too wiped after everything that had happened last night, and all he wanted to do was head home to his crummy one-bedroom apartment and get some sleep. He needed as much caffeine as he could get as quickly as he could get it, if for no other reason than to steel himself for what was to come.

He took another sip and grimaced.

“How are things this morning, Erika?”

She didn’t look away from her screen as she answered.

“Small talk is a waste of time and energy.”

He tried to suppress a sigh and failed.

“Seriously? I’m all for the cause—Flavor to the Feast—but don’t you think that’s carrying it a little too far?”

She did turn to look at him then. Her eyes were cold, her almost nonexistent lips pursed.

“No, I don’t. And you have better things to spend your mental energy on. After the way you and Barry cocked up last night, you’re going to have a lot of explaining to do to Deanna.” She almost but didn’t quite smile, then turned her attention back to her screen.

Bitch, he thought. He’d forgotten how hot his coffee was, took a long swig, and said, “Fuck!” Coffee sprayed from his mouth and soaked his shirt and tie.

As he wiped uselessly at the wet mess on his clothes, he thought back to what Harris had said.

The Big Dark’s coming for you. Coming soon. I can smell it on you.

He hadn’t mentioned the old man’s pronouncement during his debriefing. He wasn’t sure why. The moment had been recorded, like all the others during the surveillance, and the Analysts were no doubt pouring over the video at that moment. So it wasn’t as if he could keep what Harris had said to him a secret. But for whatever reason, he didn’t want to talk about it right now. Besides, it probably meant nothing. Harris had long ago lost the last few remaining scraps of his sanity, and he’d most likely been raving.

Give my regards to the Vast.

Then again, in his lunacy, maybe he had sensed something that Kevin hadn’t. And maybe that was the real reason he didn’t want to talk about it—because he feared it might be true.

A cell phone lay on Erika’s desk next to the laptop. It pinged and she glanced down at the display. This time her smile was fuller.

“Deanna just texted me. She’s ready to see you.”

“Of course she is.” With another sigh, Kevin stood and started walking toward his supervisor’s office.

Deanna Nicely—and wasn’t that an ironic last name?—had one of the few private offices in the suite. It was located in the rear of the suite, down a narrow hallway, in the corner of the building. This meant that she had not one but two windows, which officially marked her as a Big Fish in their little pond.

Deanna did not believe in an open-door policy, and she insisted that everyone knock, even if she was expecting them. So when he reached her door, which had nothing on it, not even her name, he paused and knocked three times. He gave what he thought of as Goldilocks knocks—not too hard, not too soft. He’d noticed on previous visits to his boss’s office that if he didn’t knock just right, it put her in a pissy mood. And after what had happened last night, he didn’t want to make her mood any fouler than it already was.

She called out, “Come in,” on his third knock, which was odd. She usually made him wait several seconds after his last knock before giving him permission to enter. This did not bode well.

The first thing he noticed when he opened the door and stepped into Deanna’s office was that she wasn’t alone. Deanna had two chairs in front of her desk, and occupying one of them was another Maintenance employee. Olivia Kwon was a petite Asian woman, thin—if not quite as emaciated as Erika—with short black hair and a perpetually expressionless face. Kevin had never seen her smile, frown, scowl, tighten her mouth, flare her nostrils, or widen her eyes. He suspected she might be some type of artificial life form Maintenance Control was field testing, and he would’ve found that less creepy than if she were a real person that emotionless and controlled.

Both Olivia and Deanna looked at him as he entered. Olivia, of course, did so with a neutral, calm expression. Deanna, however, looked irritated. But that didn’t tell him much since she usually looked that way. She noted the fresh coffee stain on his shirt with a grimace, but she didn’t remark on it.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize you had someone else in here with you. I can wait out in the hall. Or I can come back later.”

Much later, he added mentally. Like several years.

Deanna was square-headed, broad-shouldered, and big-handed. She wore her black hair tied back in a ponytail, and while she had on the same white shirt and black pants as everyone else who worked for Maintenance, her tie—which hung over a mammary shelf of truly epic proportions—was red, a sign of her rank.

“Sit down, Mr. Benecke,” she said.

Kevin did so, feeling even more awkward than he normally did in Deanna’s presence. Was she going to give him a dressing-down in front of Olivia? If so, it didn’t make sense. Deanna was a tough boss, but she wasn’t cruel. Not without good reason, anyway.

Her office—like the rest of the suite—was almost entirely devoid of personal touches. She had a desk, chairs, laptop, cell phone, a couple filing cabinets, and of course her two windows. She always had the curtains drawn shut, though, and he’d never understood the point of having windows if you didn’t look out the damn things once in a while. The sole decorative item in the office was a framed picture hanging on the wall behind the desk. It depicted a starfield, in the middle of which was a large black space surrounded by a swirl of colors. If you looked closely, you could see several stars stretching and lengthening as they were pulled into the swirl. This was the Gyre. It lay at the heart of all creation, and it was the reason Maintenance did what they did. Kevin wasn’t sure, because he’d never spent enough time in Deanna’s office, but he thought the image in the picture might be moving, but so slowly it was almost impossible to detect.

“Have you finished your incident report about last night?” Deanna asked.

Deanna was a big woman, muscular, not fat, but the voice that came out of her stern, disapproving face was high-pitched and girlish. Kevin thought hearing that voice come out of such a severe-looking face made her even scarier.

“Not yet. I’ve been—”

She cut him off with a sharp gesture. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll have Erika type up a report for you based on the Debriefer’s notes. You can look it over later and make whatever changes or additions you deem necessary.”

It was standard procedure for Maintenance employees to speak to a Debriefer after an “incident,” but they were expected to write their own report afterward. Never before had Kevin escaped this chore, and instead of being relieved, he was suspicious. He knew better than to say anything about it, though, and he kept his mouth shut.

“Mr. Harris has been transferred to Holding, and a cleanup crew is working on his home. From what they’ve told me, the place is seriously corrupted, and we may end up having to destroy it if it can’t be cleansed.”

Kevin wasn’t surprised. The negative energy he’d felt inside Harris’s house had been strong, maybe stronger than anything he’d ever experienced before.

“And Barry?” he asked.

“Mr. Reuben’s remains are on their way to the Homestead. A memorial service will be scheduled as soon as it’s practical.”

Which meant there was a good chance Barry would never get a service. Maintenance was always busy, and more often than not, really busy. Managing entropy was more than a full-time job, and there was rarely any downtime. But again, he kept his mouth shut.

He was confused, though. If Deanna hadn’t summoned him to berate him for botching last night’s surveillance, then why was he here? Just as important, why was Olivia?

“Olivia has been driving Surveillance Van Number Six solo for the last month, ever since the loss of her partner.”

Olivia, not Ms. Kwon, he noticed. Interesting.

He turned to Olivia.

“I’m sorry I missed Simon’s memorial service. I was on assignment at the time.”

Olivia inclined her head in a motion he could only think of as mechanical. There was no emotion on her face or in her eyes.

He wasn’t sure what had happened to Olivia’s partner. He’d heard something about them locating a farm outside town where a family had been conducting rites to create a dimensional schism. Something had gone wrong—he didn’t know what—and Olivia and Simon had ended up being forced to confront the family. Simon hadn’t survived.

“Last night—while you were busy with Mr. Harris—Olivia detected a surge of negative energy in a neighborhood over by the high school. A significant surge.”

Kevin raised an eyebrow. Deanna wasn’t one for exaggeration, so when she said significant, it meant something.

“It happened on Hollyhock Drive,” Olivia said, “around 3:45 a.m. I believe I managed to pinpoint the exact location, but further surveillance will be necessary to confirm.”

“And that’s why you’re here,” Deanna said to Kevin. “I want you to partner with Olivia and take Surveillance Van Number Two and see what else you can discover about this location.”

Kevin avoided glancing at Olivia to gauge her reaction to this news. Him? He’d rather be demoted than partnered with her. He tried to keep his expression neutral, but Deanna must’ve seen something in his face, for she said, “If this intrusion is as serious as I fear it may be, I want two people working on it. And while both of you have had your separate…issues, you’re both highly qualified Surveyors. But”— she held up a finger—“Surveillance is all I want you to do. If it becomes apparent that there’s a need for closer contact, I want you to call for an Intervention Team. And by want, I mean you will. Got it? I don’t want to lose either one of you.”

And just when Kevin thought she was showing concern for them, she added, “We’re shorthanded enough as it is.”

She then asked if either of them had any questions, and they both said they didn’t.

“Good. Get to work and keep me informed. Flavor to the Feast.”

“Flavor to the Feast,” Kevin and Olivia repeated, then they rose and left the office, Olivia preceding him. Kevin closed the door behind them and followed Olivia to her cubicle. It was even more bereft of personality than Deanna’s office. Desk, a single chair, laptop, and nothing else. Olivia sat, leaving Kevin to stand awkwardly nearby.

She swiped her finger across the touch pad and the computer’s dark screen grew bright. “Is now a good time for me to brief you?” she asked.

He wanted to tell her that he was exhausted and needed to go home and get at least a few hours’ rest. Instead, he said, “Sure, but let me get a cup of coffee first.” He paused. “And a chair.”

* * *

Joan kept busy all morning with clients, and for the most part, she managed to keep her mind off her bizarre dream and her surprise basement. But at lunchtime, instead of going out with fellow therapist Theresa Martinez, as she usually did, today she claimed she needed to stay in her office and get caught up on work. Theresa said she understood and left, Joan got a package of peanut-butter-filled crackers and a diet soda from the vending machines in the hallway, then returned to her office and shut the door. After a moment’s internal debate and feeling more than a little silly, she locked the door. She then took a seat at her desk, opened her soda, took a drink, and thought about what she should do next.

Joan had a Masters in counseling, but her tiny office didn’t reflect her level of education. The room was little larger than a broom closet, and she didn’t have any windows. Although she would’ve preferred a larger workspace, the size actually worked in her favor. It helped foster an intimacy with her clients, and the lack of windows made it feel as if they were in an enclosed, hidden place, where they could talk without anyone seeing or hearing them. But Joan found the office to be a bit on the claustrophobic side, so to combat this she kept pictures of outdoor scenes on the walls. Soothing ones—a white-sanded beach with achingly blue water, a snowcapped mountain range below a mass of white clouds, lush tropical plants with thick dew-dotted leaves… Whenever she felt as if she were trapped inside these four walls, she’d pick one of the pictures and focus all her attention on it, imagining what she might hear, smell, and feel if she were really there. Her favorite was the jungle scene, but looking at it now gave her an uneasy feeling.

For an instant she felt humid tropical air enfold her, heard a metallic clacking that made the hair on the back of her neck rise. She hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast, hadn’t had anything to drink other than the couple swallows of soda she’d just taken. Acid roiled in her stomach, and she imagined the carbonated liquid inside her foaming, expanding. Her stomach lurched and she thought she was going to puke on her desk, but she managed to turn and lean over the wastebasket. Her stomach muscles spasmed once, twice, but nothing came up. Slowly, the clacking sound faded, and while she was covered with sweat, she no longer felt warm. She felt cold, so much so that she started shivering.

She wanted to throw the damn crackers away—the thought of eating made her stomach cramp a little—but she feared part of her problem, although by no means all of it, was low blood sugar. So she unwrapped the crackers and forced herself to start nibbling one. The mushy peanut-buttery paste was a near-tasteless lump in her mouth, but she managed to swallow it with the help of good-sized swigs of soda, and after several minutes of this, she did begin to feel better, at least a little. Her head had begun to ache, though, and she hoped it wouldn’t get any worse. She didn’t want to take any medicine, not with how touchy her stomach was.

Her phone rested on her desk, and she looked at it now. She thought about calling Allison, but she was reluctant to do so, and she didn’t know why. Discovering you were the owner of a hidden basement was weird enough, but to find it on the morning after having one of the worst—if not the worst—nightmares you’d ever had increased the bizarre factor exponentially. And there had been that moment when she’d been down in the basement, when she’d experienced some kind of flashback to her dream. Just as she had a moment ago. Maybe she’d be better off not calling Allison, and when she got home, she should put new wallpaper over the basement door. Or better yet, cover it with plaster. They’d been happy enough with the place before they’d discovered the basement. And it wasn’t as if she and Jon needed the extra space. The house was more than big enough for the two of them.

You’re acting like there’s something wrong with the basement, she told herself. Like it’s a Bad Place.

So what was she saying? That she thought the basement was haunted? She tried to laugh at the idea, but all she managed was a soft choking sound.

Not haunted, she thought. Something worse.

Her vision blurred and for a second she thought she saw cold blue-green flame burning in the night. But then the vision, if that’s what it was, faded and was gone.

She snatched the phone off the desk and called Allison.

It rang six times, and Joan thought she was going to have to leave a message, but then Allison answered.

“Hey, Joan! What’s up?”

At first Joan was startled that Allison had greeted her by name, but then she realized the other woman must have caller ID. But then again, why would she have her office number programmed in instead of her cell?

You’re becoming too paranoid, girl.

“Hey, Allison. I’m on my lunch break, and I thought I’d call and see how Indiana is treating you.”

“I’m going crazy playing housewife. I’ve got résumés in at a few places, but no nibbles so far. We’re not hurting for money, though. Wes makes a good salary at his new job. But there’s only so many times you can run the vacuum before you start climbing the walls.”

“You’ll find something soon, I’m sure. And before long you’ll be complaining that you’re so busy you don’t have time to clean your house.”

Allison laughed. “From your mouth to God’s ears. So how are you and Jon adjusting to the house? Loving it as much as we did, I hope.”

Joan didn’t answer right away. Her silence went on too long, prompting Allison to say, “Hello? You still there, Joan?”

“Yeah. Sorry. It’s just that something weird happened this morning.”

She went on to tell Allison about her discovery of the basement. She didn’t say anything about her dream or the flashback she’d experienced down there, though. When she finished, she asked, “Did you know about the basement?”

“No, I didn’t. That is so strange! To think we had an extra room the entire time we lived there. It’s kind of cool and kind of creepy at the same time.”

Creepy, yes, Joan thought. Cool, not so much.

“Did you know the people who owned the house before you?”

“Not personally. Our Realtor told us a doctor lived there. A widower. He was getting ready to retire, and I guess he didn’t want to stay there with no one for company but memories, you know?” She paused for a moment, and then in a breathless voice added, “Hey, you don’t suppose he was some kind of serial killer who buried his victims in the basement, do you?”

Jon had said the same thing this morning.

“The floor is concrete,” Joan said.

“Maybe he put in the floor after he buried them. Or maybe he stuck them in the walls or something.”

Joan couldn’t believe she was talking about this seriously. Was she considering the possibility that there were dead bodies in her newly discovered basement?

“If he did hide bodies down there, why would he do such a crappy job of concealing the door? Why use a thin layer of wallpaper when you could plaster it over?”

“Maybe he thought wallpaper was enough. After all, anyone crazy enough to murder a bunch of people and seal up their bodies in the basement isn’t going to be the most logical person.”

“I suppose. So should I call someone to come out and check the basement?”

“You mean like calling in an exterminator when you find out you have cockroaches? Corpse Removal R Us? I don’t think there’s anyone like that.”

“I was thinking more along the lines of the police.”

Allison’s mention of cockroaches had set Joan’s brain to buzzing. She heard metallic clack-clack-clack sounds, saw large black shapes scuttle forth from the treeline. A wave of nausea came over her and she thought she was going to puke in the wastebasket after all, but the sound went away, and with it, the urge to vomit.

“You can call the cops if you want,” Allison said. “I’m not sure what they can do, though. I admit that hiding the basement door like that is strange, but you don’t have any evidence that anything bad happened in the house. And I don’t think the cops will want to break through the concrete floor and start digging just because a couple friends started imagining the worst when talking on the phone.”

You were the one who brought up buried bodies, Joan thought. Aloud, she said, “You’re probably right.”

“There’s got to be a logical reason someone wanted to conceal the basement. Maybe the doctor’s wife was dementing before she died, and he was afraid she’d fall down the stairs if she tried to go into the basement. And after she did die, he never bothered to take the wallpaper down.”

Joan felt better after hearing Allison’s theory. It made a hell of a lot more sense than the woman’s first melodramatic suggestion.

“Even so,” Allison said, “you might want to put some air fresheners down there. Just in case.”

* * *

One of Joan’s afternoon clients cancelled, so she snuck out of the office and ran down the block to grab some caffeine at the corner Starbucks. She got her coffee, and when she checked the time on her phone, she saw she had fifteen minutes until her next client—a sixtyish woman with an addiction to both alcohol and gambling, and who suffered from a fairly strong oppositional defiance disorder to boot. She decided to take advantage of the time to sit and chill out a little. Working with the woman always exhausted her, and she wanted to metaphorically gird her loins for the battle ahead.

The café offered free WiFi, so she connected with her phone and logged on to Google. She started to type in Maegarr, but she wasn’t certain how to spell it. Instead, she entered eat the night. A lot of the results that came up were for something called night-eating syndrome, but the top result was for a Wikipedia page for Eat the Night (song). She selected it.

The entry wasn’t long. It said the song had appeared on an album of the same name, released by a band called Slogeny in 1972. There was some information about how high the song had charted (it made it all the way to number four the year it was released), how many films it had been used in (three), and such. But what interested her the most was the section labeled Themes.

Both the lyrics and music for “Eat the Night” were written by Slogeny founder and frontman Mark Maegarr.

Maegarr’s name was in blue, meaning it was a link to an entry about him, but she wasn’t ready to click it yet, so she kept reading.

He said the song was inspired by a visit to an old country cemetery.

“I saw all these old headstones. Small ones that had been so eroded over the years that you could barely make out the letters and numbers. Some of them dated back to the 1800’s, and sadly, a number of them were for kids or even babies. It got me thinking, you know? Entropy is all, as the saying goes. That’s what the song’s about. Hell, it’s what almost all my songs are about.”

She read that section several times before working up the courage to click on Maegarr’s name.

The entry for Mark Maegarr came up, and as she began reading, she felt increasingly sick. There was his autobiographical data—Born 1932, Shelton, Iowa. Died 1981, Placidity, Republic of Suriname.

She felt a pinprick of pain behind her right eye as she read Placidity.

She skimmed over the sections covering his childhood and early career—neither of which was particularly interesting—and slowed down when she reached the entry for Placidity.

In 1977—at the height of Slogeny’s fame—Maegarr stopped performing and recording music. He’d wholeheartedly adopted a view often expressed in his songs: The universe is destined to eventually suffer complete entropic collapse, but rather than heralding the end of existence, he believed this process would result in a rebirth of a new and better universe. Therefore, the most noble thing humanity can do is speed up the process. He began delving into science, religion, philosophy, and the occult, searching for ways to accelerate entropy. He drew a number of followers to him. They came from different nationalities, ethnicities, and economic levels. The only common denominator among them was a sympathy to Maegarr’s beliefs and a willingness to subjugate themselves to him. In 1979, inspired by the Reverend Jim Jones, Maegarr and his followers traveled to the Republic of Suriname, where they built a settlement they dubbed Placidity.

“What Jonestown got wrong, we’ll get right,” Maegarr said when they first broke ground.

Life in Placidity was shrouded in secrecy. During the first year of its existence, Maegarr allowed reporters access, although he was careful to control what they saw. But after that, for whatever reasons, he forbade visitors and refused to allow his followers—who called themselves the Congregation—to have any contact with the outside world. No one knows for certain what happened after that, although there is much speculation. What is known is that on the evening of August 27, 1981, during what’s known as the Big Dry Season in Suriname, Maegarr and his 363 followers died in the pavilion that served as the settlement’s central meeting place. The cause of their deaths is unknown. The bodies weren’t discovered for nearly a month until reporters from Time magazine attempted to gain access to Placidity and found the settlement no longer guarded. By this time, scavengers and the elements had reduced the bodies to little more than skeletons. Some believe that Maegarr and his followers committed suicide, copying the Jonestown Massacre. Others believe they were killed by unknown assailants, a rebel group of some sort, perhaps even a breakaway faction of the Congregation itself. Whatever happened, Suriname authorities took over the scene, buried the remains in a mass grave, and bulldozed the settlement. Nature has since reclaimed the land where Placidity once stood, and today the precise location is difficult to determine, although that doesn’t keep those obsessed with Maegarr, his philosophy, and the Congregation’s terrible end from making pilgrimages to Suriname to find it.

There were more sections on Maegarr’s personal life, his legacy, references used in writing the entry, and a list of resources for further reading, but Joan didn’t have the stomach for any more. She closed her phone’s web browser and set the device down on the table with a shaking hand.

She should’ve felt better after reading the article. She had no memory of ever hearing Maegarr’s music before or learning the fate of his followers. But she must have done both somewhere along the line, and for whatever reason, her subconscious had dredged up the horrible details and used them to create a nightmare. An awful nightmare, the kind that could unsettle a person for days, even weeks, but a nightmare nevertheless. Unpleasant in the extreme, but perfectly normal.

But her rationalization didn’t make her feel any better. If anything, she felt worse. The pain behind her right eye had intensified to the point where it felt as if someone had slid an ice pick into her brain and was stirring it around. Acid roiled in her stomach, and her intestines spasmed painfully. She felt like a furnace inside, but her skin was cold and clammy, and the beads of sweat that formed on her body were ice-cold.

She looked at her coffee, which she hadn’t touched since she’d sat down. She stood, slid her phone into her purse, grabbed her coffee, and threw it in the trash on her way out the door. Being out in the fresh air made her feel better, if only a little. As she started walking in the direction of her office, she took out her phone and called Theresa.

“Hey, it’s Joan. I’m not feeling too well, and I think I’m going to go home early and rest. I don’t know. Flu, maybe. Can you cancel my appointments for the rest of the day? I only have two left. Sylvia Petrey and Lee Bass. Right. Thanks, I will.”

She disconnected and put the phone away. When she reached the office building, she walked into the parking lot, got in her car, and drove home with the windows down so she could feel the wind in her face.

She did not turn on the radio.

CHAPTER 4

As she drove, Joan thought about the basement, trying to determine why its discovery had so unsettled her. Finding an unexpected empty room in your new house should’ve been a good thing, so why did it feel like the opposite? It had been a long time since she’d been in therapy, but she had a good idea what a psychologist would tell her.

You’re uncomfortable about the basement because it’s something you don’t understand, and that makes it threatening. It’s no wonder you’re having a strong reaction to something that feels like a threat to your new home. Not after what happened when you were a child.

What happened…

* * *

“Can I watch The Little Mermaid?”

Joanie sat on the carpet in front of the TV set. A nature show was on, one about lions. She liked lions okay, especially the girl ones. They were strong and beautiful at the same time, a combination she hoped she’d be when she grew up. But the program was showing how lions hunted, and she didn’t want to see them chasing down and tearing apart a baby antelope or something. She hated watching things get hurt, and she couldn’t stand the sight of blood, even fake movie blood. There were even some sequences in The Little Mermaid, her official all-time favorite movie, that made her uncomfortable, if not downright anxious. But if she had to keep watching the lions, she knew she’d end up having really bad nightmares later—dreams filled with sharp claws, ivory fangs, and blood. Rivers of it.

It did not occur to her to get up and leave the room so she wouldn’t have to watch the lionesses make their kill. She was nine, and as long as the TV was on, she’d sit in front of it, no matter how uncomfortable the images it displayed made her. When no one answered her question, she turned around to face the couch.

“Mom? Can I?”

Her mother sat on the couch, doing a crossword puzzle in last week’s Sunday paper. She always meant to do them on the day the paper arrived, but she never got around to it until the following Saturday evening, and she rushed to complete it before the next Sunday paper came. She almost never managed to finish the puzzles, though, and Joanie wasn’t sure why she kept trying. Her mother was a short woman with long black hair and a dark complexion that hinted at Middle Eastern ancestry, although she’d never said anything about it. She wore glasses to help with her distance vision, but she always looked over the top of the lenses when she read.

“It’s okay with me if Ashley doesn’t care,” her mother said, not looking up from her puzzle.

Joanie looked to her sister. Ashley sat on the opposite end of the couch from their mother. She was taller than Mom and wore her blonde hair short. She was seventeen, eight years older than Joanie, and as far as Joanie was concerned, her sister was as much of an adult as their parents. She sat with her legs beneath her and her arms folded. She wasn’t looking at the TV. Instead, she looked out the front window to the right of the TV. The curtains were open, but it was after eight, and it was dark out. Joanie didn’t think Ashley was really looking at anything, though. Her brow was crinkled into a frown and her lips were pressed together in a tight line. She was looking out the window because she didn’t want to look at their mother. She was too mad.

Joanie didn’t want to say anything to Ashley. She was afraid she’d only become a lightning rod for her sister’s anger. She almost didn’t speak, but she really wanted to watch Ariel, so in a soft voice she said, “Ashley? Is it okay?”

Ashley didn’t respond at first, and Joanie was debating whether to ask again and risk making her angry when she finally answered.

“Do what you want. I don’t give a shit.”

Joanie gasped. She had heard Ashley swear lots of times before, but never ever in front of one of their parents.

But instead of yelling at Ashley, Mom said, “You can be as big of a bitch to me as you want, but don’t take it out on your sister. She hasn’t done anything to you.”

Mom didn’t look up from her puzzle as she said this, and Ashley didn’t look at her. But Ashley’s face reddened and her lips whitened as she pressed them together harder.

The atmosphere was thick with angry tension, and it was so much worse than watching lions stalk and kill prey. Joanie felt tears building up behind her eyes, and she debated whether she should forget about her movie and run to her room, shut the door, climb in bed, and hide under the covers and let the tears come or if she should pretend that everything was okay, put the movie in, and watch it, singing along with the songs as if it were a normal Saturday night. She was old enough to understand that adults spent a lot of time pretending things were all right when they weren’t. And who knows? Maybe the movie would cheer up her mother and sister. Who could stay mad when such as awesome movie was on?

Joanie stood, went to the cabinet where they kept the movies, found The Little Mermaid, and slid the cassette into the VCR. The TV remote sat on the coffee table, and Joanie walked over to it and changed the channel to display the feed from the VCR. She wanted to turn the volume up higher—she liked to listen to the songs as loud as she could get away with—but she didn’t want to press her luck. If the movie was too loud, either Mom or Ashley might make her turn it off. So normal volume it was. As the movie started, she sat on the couch between her mother and sister, an equal distance from both. She hoped her nearness might keep them from fighting with each other. Besides, her butt hurt from sitting on the floor.

As tense as the emotional atmosphere was in the family room, Joanie knew it would’ve been much worse if her father had been there. But he was out in the garage, tinkering with the engine of a Ford POS—whatever that meant. He worked as a plumber, but his passion was cars, and he spent almost all his free time messing around with them. Joanie was glad he had something to keep him busy right now, but she was also sad he wasn’t here. Even when things were strained in their family—which they often were these days—she preferred them to be together. That’s what the word family meant to her: togetherness. Families were supposed to take care of one another, even when they didn’t always like each other. Especially then.

Togetherness meant home, it meant peace. It meant something even deeper than those things, a grown-up word she didn’t remember hearing before but which she nevertheless knew.

Placidity.

The doorbell rang fifteen minutes into the movie. Ashley started to get up to answer it, but Mom motioned for her to remain seated.

“I’ll get it,” she said. She put her puzzle and pen on the coffee table, rose from the couch, and headed toward the foyer.

The doorbell rang again before she was halfway there.

“I’m coming!” she said, irritated.

Joanie didn’t watch her mother as she walked out of the family room. Instead, she watched Ashley. Her sister’s body was rigid, and she’d sucked in her lower lip. She stared after their mother, eyes wide, as if she was scared. But coldness accompanied the fear, along with growing anticipation. Joanie had no memory of ever seeing such a strange mixture of emotions in anyone’s eyes, but she instantly recognized it. Ashley was both frightened and excited at the same time. She knew what was going to happen next, and she both dreaded it and was looking forward to it. And what was the it? There was no way Joanie should’ve known, but she did. The it was blood.

Mom opened the front door, and all she managed to get out was, “Billy, we told you—” before an explosion cut off her voice.

Joanie saw her mother’s body fly backward and hit the foyer floor with a dull thud. Her chest was a smear of crimson, and her arms and legs twitched like she were an insect that had just been stepped on.

“Fuck yeah!” Ashley shouted. She jumped off the couch and ran over to Mom, and without hesitating kicked her hard on the side of the head. “How do you like that, you BITCH?!”

She practically shrieked that last word and kicked Mom in the head a couple more times.

A harsh tang drifted into the family room, and although Joanie had never seen anyone fire a gun in real life, she knew she was smelling gunpowder.

Billy stepped into view then, a wide grin on his face. He looked at Ashley and his grin grew wider.

“Didn’t think I’d have the stones to do it, did you?”

He was a skinny kid, thinner than Ashley, actually, with stick arms and legs. He had long, greasy brown hair, and his complexion was pale, as if he never went outside. He wore jeans and a T-shirt that said Take the Skinheads Bowling. Joanie had no idea what it meant.

She hadn’t moved from her position on the couch, and she didn’t do so now. Her throat felt as if it had closed up, and without thinking about it, she removed her inhaler from her pocket, took a hit, then replaced it. She stared at her mother’s body, noting that her limbs no longer twitched, and desperately tried to process what was happening. Billy wasn’t supposed to be here. Mom and Dad had forced Ashley to break up with him after the police caught him mutilating a dead dog in an alley behind a Laundromat downtown. They’d said he wasn’t the kind of boy their daughter should be dating. But from the expression of savage joy on Ashley’s face as she gazed down at their dead mother, Joanie thought that Billy was exactly her kind of boy.

You’re in shock, she thought. Except the thought-voice didn’t sound like her, didn’t feel like her. It felt like someone older. Sadder.

She heard the garage door burst open then, followed by her father’s footfalls as he pounded through the kitchen. He entered the family room from the opposite direction, a claw hammer gripped in his hand.

“What the hell was—” He broke off as he saw his wife lying on the foyer on the other side of the family room, Ashley and Billy standing over her body. He didn’t look at Joanie, and she had no idea if he was aware of her presence at all.

Dad was a tall man, lean, clean-shaven, with prematurely white hair. He liked to joke that he spilled a bottle of drain-cleaning chemicals on his head when he was an apprentice plumber. He wore an old brown flannel shirt and ragged pair of grease- and oil-stained jeans.

Ashley and Billy turned to face Dad. Ashley’s grin was as wild and mad as Billy’s. Billy cradled the shotgun in the crook of his arm, the barrel pointed at the floor.

“You shouldn’t have tried to control me, Glenn.” Ashley sneered as she said Dad’s first name. “Now you’re going to get what she got.” She half turned toward Mom and nodded at her body. For a moment, Joanie thought she might give her another kick, but she didn’t. Joanie guessed it was because she didn’t want to take her eyes off Dad.

Joanie got off the couch then and, moving slowly, started toward Dad. His gaze flicked to her for a split second as she passed him, but then he looked toward Ashley and Billy again. Joanie couldn’t see it, but she had no trouble imagining Billy raising his shotgun and aiming it at her father. She continued through the dining room and into the kitchen. She heard yelling. Daddy, Ashley, Billy, too. She couldn’t make out what any of them were saying, but she supposed it didn’t matter. She walked to the counter and removed a long, sharp knife from the butcher block. As the metal blade slid free of its wooden slot, a second shotgun blast roared, followed by a thud she knew was the sound of her father falling to the family room carpet. She gripped the knife handle as tight as she could, then started walking again. She headed for the foyer, intending to enter the family room from the other side—the side Ashley and Billy were on.

“That was cool as fuck!” Billy said. “My cock is so hard right now, I could drill a hole through concrete! You care if I fuck your sister?”

“Don’t be gross,” Ashley said. “She’s just a little kid. You can fuck her after you kill her if you want, though. It’s not like she’ll give a shit then.”

Joanie stepped into the foyer. She saw her mother’s body, blood spreading out from her chest wound on either side of her, like red liquid wings. The shotgun blast had ripped through the shirt she’d been wearing, exposing her right breast. Or rather, what was left of it, as the flesh had been shredded into bloody raw hamburger. Her lips were parted, her mouth forming a little O of surprise. Her eyes were dead as a mannequin’s, and Joanie experienced an impulse to kneel down and close them, like people did in the movies. She’d always thought people did that out of respect for the dead. Now she knew they did it because they couldn’t stand seeing those dead fish eyes gazing at them.

She looked up from her mother’s corpse and saw that the front door was open. She could run outside, scream for help, keep on running until someone heard her and came to see what was wrong. Billy and Ashley wouldn’t come after her then. They’d be too afraid of getting caught. Billy might have had a gun, but he didn’t have enough ammunition to kill the whole neighborhood. He and Ashley would be forced to let her go, and she would live, and Billy wouldn’t get to stick his thing inside her.

She was tempted. But this was her home. Ashley and her fucked-up psycho boyfriend had destroyed her peace, her placidity. She couldn’t let them get away with that.

She stepped around her mother’s body, careful not to slip in blood, and entered the family room. Billy stood at her father’s feet, laughing, while Ashley, straddling Dad’s crotch, rode him like he was a dead horse.

Joanie calmly walked up to Billy. He’d put the shotgun on the floor and had unzipped his pants. He was stroking his thing—which really wasn’t as long and scary now that she saw it—with rapid motions while Ashley ground on their dead father and made exaggerated moaning sounds. A thought drifted through Joanie’s mind then, spoken in the older woman’s voice.

Entropy sucks.

Joanie wasn’t sure what entropy meant, but she agreed with the weary emotion beneath the woman’s words.

She stepped in front of Billy and jabbed the knife into his thing with four quick motions—stab-stab-stab-stab. He howled, blood gushing, and hunched over and dropped his hands to his crotch in a useless attempt to keep his blood from leaving his body. Ashley, still straddling their father, turned around to see what her sister had done.

“You little—”

Joanie darted forward and swiped the blade through the air in a wide arc. A line opened on Ashley’s throat, she made a wet clicking sound deep inside, and then the blood began to flow. Joanie, still holding tight to the knife, went over to the shotgun, picked it up, and carried it out of Billy and Ashley’s reach. The older voice, the one that called itself Debbie, had advised her to do so.

Dying people have nothing to lose, the woman had said. They’ll try to take you with them if they can.

Joanie slid the shotgun behind the TV stand, and as Ariel sang the notes that would cause her voice to leave her body and go to Ursula, she watched her sister and her boyfriend fall to the carpet and bleed to death.

* * *

It had been years since Joan had allowed herself to remember that night. Really remember it, as if it were happening again. Usually when she thought about it—which wasn’t often—the most she would allow herself to do was recall the basic facts, almost as if she were reading a dry summary of the event written by someone with no emotional attachment to it. But this time the memory had come back full force, so strong that she had to pull into a strip mall parking lot and wait for it to pass, teeth gritted, hands tight on the steering wheel, almost as if she were having some kind of seizure. After it was over, she opened the car windows to let in fresh air and sat for a few more minutes, shaking and drenched in sweat. When she thought she had it together again—together enough, at any rate—she backed out of the parking space, pulled onto the road, and continued heading home. Her home. The home that nobody or nothing would be able to take from her.

Ever.

* * *

“Why are you taking so long?”

Kevin walked down the sidewalk a block east from Joan Lantz’s house. He wore a long-sleeved blue work shirt and darker blue jacket with a power company logo sewn on the left side of the chest. Jeans, brown work boots, and—most important of all—a clipboard completed his disguise. Along with his ever-present smart glasses and earpieces, that is.

He took a phone from his pants pocket and held it to his ear. He didn’t activate it, though. He was using it as a prop, another element in his disguise. It wouldn’t do for someone—a housewife, third-shift worker, or retiree—to look out their front window and see him walking through the neighborhood while appearing to hold a conversation with himself.

“I like to get a feel for the general environment before making an initial approach.”

“Looks to me like you’re stalling. Maybe Deanna should’ve placed you on leave. After all, you did lose your partner less than twelve hours ago.”

She was implying… No, she was coming right out and saying that he wasn’t ready to return to duty. And she might be hinting that, as far as she was concerned, he’d never been suitable for his job in the first place.

“I’m not the only one who’s lost a partner recently,” he said, his tone cold.

“True. But the difference is that I know his death wasn’t my fault. Can you say the same?”

“Admit it. You’re a robot, aren’t you? No one can be that big of a bitch unless they were programmed to be.”

No response.

The silence stretched on for several minutes until finally he sighed. “I’ll head over to Hollyhock Avenue and get started.”

She didn’t acknowledge this, but he had no doubt she was still there, sitting in the van a couple blocks away, listening, recording, and judging.

There wasn’t anything special about the homes on Hollyhock. They were newer by a decade or two than the houses in Harris’s neighborhood, and they were for the most part better maintained. Certainly there were no outside signs of corruption on the houses or the properties. Yes, the sidewalk was cracked in numerous places, and there was a hint of sourness in the air that reminded him of an empty garbage receptacle badly in need of being cleaned. But these details, unpleasant as they might be, were hardly out of the ordinary. Then again, the first indications of corruption were often subtle.

The house that Olivia and Kevin had come to observe was number 552, and according to the information supplied by the Researchers, it had been newly purchased by Jon and Joan Lantz. They’d moved in less than a month ago, after having purchased the house from friends of theirs named Wes and Allison Bishop. Kevin hadn’t said anything to Olivia when they’d received the case file, but he’d been surprised that she had detected any negative energy here. People were usually excited about a new home purchase and because of this, they brought a lot of positive energy with them when they moved in. It was possible that the Lantzes’ relationship was dysfunctional and toxic—although there had been no indication of this in the file. He supposed there was a chance that it was a Fissure, one of those areas where reality was more fragile than in others, allowing unnatural energies to bleed through. But if that was the case, wouldn’t one of their vans have detected it during a routine scanning patrol long before now? It wasn’t as if Fissures popped up overnight like mushrooms after a heavy rainfall.

From a distance, the Lantzes’ house was rather bland-looking, and his opinion didn’t change the closer he got. It was a small ranch, with a black roof, black shutters, and pale yellow siding. It was the sort of muted pastel color you’d expect to find on an Easter egg. The garage was set at a right angle to the house, and the concrete driveway curved from the street, past the front door, to the garage. Both the front and garage doors were white and looked to have been painted recently, certainly within the last couple years. As he drew closer, he examined the yard. The grass could use trimming, but the lawn looked healthy enough and there were no thinning or bare patches, at least not in front. There were flower beds along the front of the house and side of the garage, and the flowers and plants there also looked healthy.

He still had his phone in his hand, and he raised it to his head once again.

“Things look good so far. You see anything that I don’t?”

“Undoubtedly. But nothing that hints at corruption.”

“Very funny.”

He lowered the phone and tucked it into his pocket. He stopped when he reached the end of the Lantzes’ driveway and looked at the legal pad on his clipboard, as if consulting it. He gave a nod in case anyone was watching, lowered the clipboard, and then started walking up the driveway. He tucked the clipboard under his arm and reached into his jacket pocket. He removed a small device encased in black plastic that wasn’t much larger than his phone, and as he walked, he swept it from side to side, keeping a close eye on the machine’s digital readout. The symbols that flashed on the screen weren’t numbers or letters, and they would’ve been meaningless to anyone who didn’t work for Maintenance. The readout came as a shock to him, and he had to stare at it for several long moments as he tried to convince himself to believe it.

“You don’t have to ask. I see it too. And before you say anything, I ran a thorough equipment check before we left. The scanner is working properly.”

“I’ve never seen a reading this high. I didn’t even know it was possible.”

If the reading was accurate, the house—hell, the whole goddamned neighborhood—should’ve been nothing but desolate ruins radiating negative energy. But the house looked normal, and when he stepped away from it—as he did now—the reading dropped quickly. It was as if whatever darkness the house harbored it was, for the most part, managing to contain it. So contained, in fact, it would be hard to detect from the street. It was something of a minor miracle that Olivia had discovered it—and all by herself. He had never encountered anything like this before. It was as if instead of radiating outward, the negative energy was flowing inward, almost as if this house was some kind of sinkhole of corruption.

Kevin walked around the Lantzes’ home to examine it, but because of the intense reading of negative energy it gave off, he kept more distance from it than he normally did when conducting an investigation. He removed several small sensors from his jacket pocket and pressed them into the ground at regularly spaced intervals. They wouldn’t provide as much information as sensors placed inside the house, but they were a good first step. Besides, given the readings they’d gotten so far, he was more than a little reluctant to enter the place.

When he’d finished placing sensors in the backyard, Olivia’s voice sounded in his ears.

“I’ll keep watch while you place sensors inside.”

Kevin wanted to protest that this wasn’t a good time, that one or both of the Lantzes might be home. But according to Research, both Jon and Joan worked outside the home and chances were excellent that they were both gone for the day. Normal procedure would’ve been to inspect the house and yard, place outside sensors, and then continue to conduct surveillance for several days before attempting to place any sensors inside. But given the intensity of negative energy that suffused the Lantzes’ house, this situation was anything but normal. Placing sensors inside was absolutely imperative. Kevin knew this. He didn’t like it, though, and he especially didn’t like Olivia reminding him in that near emotionless tone of hers.

Definitely a robot, he thought.

Knowing that Olivia had likely already reported the readings they’d recorded so far and Analysts were probably watching his live feed, Kevin didn’t hesitate, although he really wanted to. The house had a door to the sunroom in the back, and there was a separate door next to the kitchen. He decided to try the door next to the kitchen first, and he headed for it. As he drew closer to the house, he expected to feel some indication of the negative energy it was giving off. Queasiness, dizziness, tingling in the extremities, the sense that he was almost but not quite hearing sinister voices whispering… But he experienced none of these things, which in its own way was even more disturbing than if his body had reacted to the house. What sort of force could generate that much negative energy—far more than he’d encountered at Harris’s house—and still control it to the point where only a fraction leaked out? It was a terrifying question, and as much as Maintenance needed to know the answer, Kevin wasn’t sure he wanted to find out. Still, the Analysts were watching, so—after popping a couple antacids—he reached out with a hand as steady as he could keep it and tried the doorknob. It was locked, of course, and although he knew that was no excuse for him to give up, he still felt a moment of relief. But he pushed it aside and took his lockpick kit out of his pocket. Thankfully, the Lantzes’ home wasn’t protected by a home security system. That wouldn’t have stopped him, but it would have been a pain in the ass to work around. Kevin liked to keep things as simple as he could, especially when dealing with a nexus of negative energy stronger than any that had ever been recorded in Ash Creek.

He opened the kit and was about to select a pick when Olivia spoke.

“Come around front. There’s something you should see.”

Her voice startled him, and he nearly dropped his kit. But he closed it, slipped it into his jacket pocket, and headed around the side of the house. He knew the main reason Olivia wanted him out front was to give the Analysts a closer look at whatever-it-was, so when he rounded the corner of the house and entered the front yard, he didn’t look at his clipboard but instead faced forward to make sure the cameras in his glasses had unobstructed views.

At first the only thing out of the ordinary he noticed was Surveillance Van Number Two parked at the end of the street. Olivia had moved the vehicle closer while he’d been in the back. Standard procedure was to keep a van farther away during an initial survey, but drivers had the discretion to move closer if they deemed it necessary, which evidently Olivia had.

But other than that…

“The mail carrier,” Olivia said with a hint of exasperation.

Kevin didn’t see anyone in the direction of the van, so he turned to look in the opposite direction, and there he was, a half dozen houses away and moving toward the Lantzes’. He was of medium height and build, with a rounded mound of black hair that looked as if it had been sculpted from plastic and painted. He wore a short-sleeved postal uniform and short pants, and his skin had an orange-yellow cast, as if he’d applied spray-on tanning solution. At first Kevin didn’t understand why Olivia had bothered alerting him to the man’s presence, but then he noticed two things. One, the man moved in a way that wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t that he limped or swung his arms in strange spastic motions. His legs moved with smooth, sure, almost machinelike precision. But the upper half of his body remained statue-still. The smiling expression on his face didn’t vary either. It was as if his features had been molded from plastic. And while the man wasn’t close enough yet for Kevin to tell, he thought he didn’t blink.

All of that was weird enough, but the second thing that Kevin noticed was equally strange: the man wasn’t stopping at any houses. He wore a postal carrier’s uniform and carried a mail pouch slung over his shoulder. But he didn’t so much as turn his head to look at any of the houses he passed—not that Kevin was certain the man could turn that bizarre waxwork head of his. The man continued moving down the sidewalk at a brisk pace, and even before he started angling his body toward the Lantzes’ house, Kevin knew that was the man’s destination. Really, where else could he be going?

Kevin stood at the side of the Lantzes’ home and watched as the carrier moved onto the grass and made for the white plastic mailbox affixed to the outer wall next to the front door. The man gave no sign that he was aware of Kevin’s presence. He walked briskly up to the door, keeping his upper body motionless and the smile frozen on his face the entire way. He stopped in front of the mailbox, and only then did his upper body move. He reached into the pouch with his right hand, removed a large padded envelope, opened the mailbox with his other hand, placed the envelope inside, and then lowered his hand. The envelope was too large for the lid to close, and it jutted out of the box at an angle. The carrier lowered his arms to his side, paused for a moment, and then turned away from the mailbox and started walking back toward the sidewalk with his eerily smooth stride, upper body once more motionless and rigid, unvarying smile still in place.

The carrier’s path wasn’t going to bring him close to Kevin—although it was close enough for him to be able to determine that yes, the man did not blink. Kevin removed the hand scanner from his pocket, and he quickly activated the device and pointed it at the carrier. He was not at all surprised to see the readout light up with a series of symbols indicating extremely high levels of negative energy. If a human carried that much negative energy, he or she would be dead. Then again, given the strange way he moved, maybe he was dead. In Kevin’s line of work, it wasn’t always easy to tell.

Kevin allowed his gaze to linger on the readout for several seconds to ensure the Analysts got a good look at it. He then deactivated the device and slipped it into his pocket. He was about to follow the carrier when Olivia spoke.

“Place sensors inside the house. I’ll follow him.”

He heard the van start up and watched as Olivia pulled away from the curb and started driving slowly down the street in the direction the carrier had taken, the same direction from which he’d come. The man—or whatever he was—continued down the sidewalk at a good clip, ignoring all the other houses he passed.

The van’s windows were down, and Olivia waved at Kevin as she passed, although she didn’t take her gaze off the carrier. Kevin scowled and his hand tightened on the clipboard. Since when did she give the orders? A Surveillance Team were supposed to be equals, working toward a common goal. There was a certain amount of give and take, as in any partnership, but one didn’t order the other. It was simply not how things were done.

Kevin glared at the back of the van as Olivia trailed the carrier. He wasn’t the most confrontational person in the world, but he was going to have to talk with Olivia and straighten out a few things. He didn’t care how tight she was with Deanna. If he allowed her to boss him around at the beginning of their partnership, he’d have to put up with it forever. That conversation was going to have to wait, though. He still needed to place those sensors, and he wanted to get a look at the envelope the carrier had left. It might—

His thoughts halted abruptly when he saw Joan Lantz’s Mazda turn onto Hollyhock Avenue and begin heading toward her house. And him.

* * *

Joan was still shaking from her vivid recollection—okay, near-hallucination—of the night her family, and that fuckwad Billy, had died, and at first she didn’t see the man standing in her yard. It wasn’t until her car was halfway up the driveway, her thumb on the button of the garage door opener attached to the visor above her, when she finally noticed him. She hit the brake too hard and was thrown forward and almost smacked her forehead on the steering wheel. She put the car in park, turned off the ignition, and got out. Before she realized what she was doing, she was marching across the grass toward the man, brow furrowed in a dangerous frown, fists clenched as if she might throw a punch or two when she reached him.

As she charged toward him, she noted his uniform and his clipboard, and part of her mind catalogued him as worker, probably power or water. But she didn’t care if he had a reason—even a good reason—to be standing on her lawn in the afternoon holding his goddamned clipboard. This was her house, and she would allow no one—no-fucking-one—to trespass on her property.

The man opened his mouth to speak as she drew near, but she cut him off before he could say anything.

“Who the hell are you and what the fuck do you want?”

The man winced as if she’d slapped him, and seeing his reaction drained some of the anger from her. But not all.

“Sorry,” she said. “Bad day. Let me try that again. Can I help you?” Better, but her voice still held a sharp edge. So be it. Today, this was as much nice as the guy was going to get from her.

“I’m Kevin…Benecke.” He sounded hesitant as he added his last name, as if unsure if he should give it. “I work for…” He paused and glanced down at his clipboard, as if he were an actor who’d forgotten his lines and needed to check his script. “The power company.” He looked up and smiled, like a little boy proud to have correctly answered a teacher’s question.

Another portion of Joan’s anger vanished. There was something about this guy, a kind of Lost Boy quality that she found endearing, despite herself. He wasn’t much in the looks department, and the overlarge glasses he wore made him look a little dorky, but he had that boyish thing going for him, along with something else she couldn’t pin down. A bit of mystery, she decided. As if there were more to him than first met the eye. She wanted to say What are you doing on my property? But she softened the question.

“And what are you doing in the neighborhood today, Mr. Benecke?”

He gave another quick glance at his clipboard. “We’ve had a few reports of meters in your area giving incorrect readings, and we want to make sure they’re calibrated correctly. You don’t want us overcharging you, right?” He rushed through his explanation, as if he were nervous.

Joan thought it was kind of cute.

“Have you checked ours yet?” she asked.

“Hmm? Oh. Yes, I have. It’s fine.”

“Good to hear.”

She smiled at him. He smiled back. Neither spoke for several moments and Joan found herself becoming uncomfortable.

“So I suppose you’ll be heading on to the next house?” she asked.

He blinked several times, almost as if she’d woken him from a trance.

“Huh? Oh, right. Moving on.”

He glanced toward her mailbox and then looked back on her.

“Have a nice day, Mrs. Lantz.”

“Thanks. You too.”

He gave her a departing nod and then started heading for the house next door—but not before giving her mailbox a final look.

Weird.

CHAPTER 5

Kevin walked around the back of the house next door to the Lantzes’. This one had a large wooden privacy fence, and he lifted the latch on the gate, opened the door, and entered the yard. He hated wasting time like this, but with Joan still standing in her front yard, he couldn’t very well haul ass down the sidewalk after Olivia and the mail carrier. He had to make sure he didn’t arouse Joan’s suspicions. Any more than he already had, that is. She’d caught him so off guard—not so much by her early arrival home as by her combative attitude as she exited her car—that he’d barely been able to get out his cover story. He’d sounded like a babbling idiot to his own ears, and he hated to think what he’d sounded like to the Analysts.

Once he was in the neighbors’ yard and the fence hid him from view, he waited until he heard Joan pull her car into the garage and close the door. He then left the neighbors’ backyard and hurried across their front lawn, jogging in the direction Olivia and the mail carrier had gone. He wished he’d had time to get a look at the envelope the carrier had dropped off at the Lantzes’. He knew Deanna would chastise him for that failure later. She also wouldn’t be happy that he’d spoken with Joan. Having direct contact with a surveillance subject—especially so early in an investigation—was strictly forbidden, but he was cautiously optimistic that Deanna would recognize the encounter as an accident and not come down too hard on him for it.

But he wasn’t sorry that Joan had come home when she did. She was an attractive woman—not gorgeous, but pretty. And she had a certain quality about her, a kind of sadness blended with great strength, which he found intriguing. But he didn’t have time to think about Joan right now. He had work to do.

He didn’t bother pretending to talk on his phone this time when he called out to Olivia.

“Olivia? Are you there? Are you all right? What’s your situation?”

“Stop asking so many questions.” She said this with the slightest hint of irritation. “Turn right at the next cross street you come to.”

Kevin could see the street she was talking about. He was winded by the time he reached it, and he wondered if maybe he should start subscribing to Maintenance’s underconsumption ethos and lose a few pounds, maybe hit the gym a couple times a week too.

He glanced at the street sign on the corner as he approached it and saw this was Evergreen Street. What was it with all the plant names around here? Hollyhock, Evergreen… You’d think people would have a bit more imagination.

He rounded the corner and stopped when he saw the surveillance van sitting in the middle of the street, engine still running. Fifty feet in front of the van stood the mail carrier. He faced the vehicle, arms at his sides, pouch still slung over his shoulder, creepy smile still plastered on his face. Despite the adrenaline surging through his system—or perhaps because of it—a great wave of exhaustion slammed into Kevin, as much mental as physical. It had been over twenty-four hours since he’d slept, and in the interim he’d witnessed his dead partner being mutilated by an insane old man. He desperately needed rest, and he felt as if he could just lie down on the sidewalk, go to sleep right here, and let Olivia deal with this situation on her own. But he couldn’t do that, and not only because the Analysts were watching. He’d lost Barry, and although he didn’t especially like Olivia, he didn’t intend to lose her too. So even though it violated procedure, he stepped into the street and started walking toward the carrier.

The man’s head swiveled smoothly on his neck as he turned to look at him. Kevin could see that not only didn’t the man blink, his eyes were so lifeless that they almost looked painted on.

“You can’t do this,” Olivia said, an edge of panic in her voice. “Not only is direct confrontation forbidden except in emergencies, it’s daylight and this is a populated area. There are bound to be witnesses.”

Kevin ignored her as he drew closer to the carrier. It was likely a combination of weariness and stress, but at that moment he didn’t give a shit about procedure. And if he ended up getting demoted, so be it.

When Kevin reached the carrier, he said, “Would you mind stepping out of the street? My friend would like to pass.” He gestured toward the van, but the carrier didn’t take his gaze off Kevin. The man didn’t reply. He just kept looking at Kevin and smiling that frozen smile of his.

Kevin didn’t have a weapon. Surveyors were discouraged from carrying them. The thinking was that if they were permitted to use weapons, they would be more inclined to engage subjects instead of merely monitor them. But right then, standing within arm’s reach of something that only bore a passing resemblance to human, Kevin wished he had a gun. A very large gun.

Then again, he did have something else.

With a swift, sure motion he swept his clipboard through the air and smacked it across the lower half of the carrier’s face. The board made a meaty thwak when it struck, and the man’s head swung to the side. At first Kevin was gratified. Take that, you smiling fucker! But his excitement gave way to surprise and then horror as he watched the man’s head spin all the way around until it was facing backward. Then it wobbled, detached from the neck, and fell to the street. It bounced, rolled, and then came to a stop, eyes still open and unblinking, smile still firmly in place.

This isn’t good, Kevin thought.

The headless body remained upright and motionless, but instead of moving closer to inspect it, Kevin took a step backward. It was a good thing he did, for an instant later the carrier’s body began to shake and then split apart. A ragged seam appeared at the neck and moved downward as it widened. The carrier’s shirt tore open, buttons flying, several hitting Kevin and bouncing off. With the carrier’s shirt now open, Kevin could see the seam extended down his torso and past his belt. The seam—which had become more of a fissure—continued to widen, making a series of cracking sounds like breaking ice as it did. No blood poured forth from the fissure, and no internal organs spilled forth. Kevin saw only blackness within the carrier’s body, and this terrified him far more than any gore or viscera ever could. He started to back away from the body slowly, then figured fuck it, turned, and ran toward the van.

“That’s the first smart thing you’ve done all day,” Olivia said.

She popped open the door for him, and he climbed into the passenger seat and slammed the door shut behind him.

“What the hell is that thing?” he said. At least, that was what he wanted to say. But he was so out of breath, his words emerged as a series of wheezes.

Olivia understood him, though, for she said, “I think we’re about to find out.”

He heard two voices, one through his glasses via the pair she wore, and one coming from her mouth. The voices weren’t quite in sync, and he found the effect a bit disorienting. She’d forgotten to turn off her glasses’ transmitter once he’d gotten into the van, but he didn’t blame her. She had other things on her mind, emphasis on thing.

He looked out the windshield in time to see the carrier’s body split apart and fall to the asphalt, revealing something that had been hiding within. At first it seemed to be nothing but a shadowy mass of darkness, roughly human-shaped. But then segmented limbs began unfolding from the form, and the creature stretched them out as if they were stiff from too long a confinement. It was glossy black, like lacquered obsidian, and when it fell forward onto its six legs, Kevin saw that it was the size of a large wolf. Its blunt squarish head terminated in a pair of large, wicked-looking mandibles, and it had had no eyes, at least none that were readily apparent. Its back was a domed shell, and Kevin wondered if wings were concealed within.

Please don’t let it have wings, he thought.

“It’s a Durg,” Olivia said with a measure of actual excitement. “I’ve heard of them but never seen one before. I thought they couldn’t exist on this level of reality.”

Kevin had no idea what she was talking about and right then he didn’t care.

“We need to get out of here,” he said. “The Analysts are watching a live feed, so they’ve already dispatched an Intervention Team.”

“It might get away.” Oliva seemed to consider for several seconds, and then she took her foot off the brake and tromped on the gas.

The van didn’t have the greatest pickup in the world, but it lurched forward and Olivia headed straight for the Durg. Kevin hadn’t put on his seat belt yet, so he slapped his palms to the dash to brace himself.

“Are you insane?” he shouted.

Olivia didn’t have time to respond, but even if she had, the question was rhetorical. Kevin was absolutely convinced she’d lost her mind. If she was a robot, maybe she was suffering from some kind of glitch in her programming. She clearly intended to run down the large insect and most likely collect the corpse and return it to Maintenance’s Ash Creek headquarters for examination—especially if the Durg was as rare as she’d implied. But the Durg didn’t intend to remain still and allow itself to be squashed. As the van bore down on it, the creature leaped into the air and landed on the windshield, its legs grabbing hold of the vehicle’s roof and sides so it could hold on. Its mandibles snapped as it attempted to break through the glass and get at the tender human morsels on the other side. The mandibles made an unsettling, almost metallic sound as they opened and closed. Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack…

“Nice move, Olivia!” he shouted.

“Shut up,” she said, soundly only mildly annoyed. She activated the van’s wipers, but the Durg tore them from their mounts and tossed them aside.

“Really?” Kevin said.

Olivia ignored him.

She didn’t have much visibility, but the Durg kept shifting its position, as if trying to find a weak spot on the windshield. This provided her enough glimpses of the street ahead to help her avoid running into parked cars or driving onto someone’s lawn. But it was only a matter of time before they hit something. And in the meantime, they were driving through the neighborhood with a gigantic and apparently other-dimensional insect attached to their van. So much for remaining inconspicuous.

“I’m beginning to see why your last partner got killed,” he muttered.

Olivia responded with the first real show of emotion he’d seen from her.

“Stop bitching at me and do something!”

Do? Kevin didn’t think of himself as a doer, but Olivia had her hands full, and there was no one else in the van, so he supposed he should at least try. But damn it, where the hell was that Intervention Team?

He got out of his seat and made his way to the van’s workstations. This was a surveillance vehicle, and there wasn’t anything even remotely resembling a weapon aboard. Tables, chairs, laptops, two-drawer filing cabinets—all bolted down to prevent them from moving. Fluorescent light strips in the ceiling, no windows. Then his eyes fell upon the fire extinguisher attached to the wall.

That’ll do, he thought.

He pulled the extinguisher from its wall mount and returned to his seat, working to keep his balance as the van swayed. Just as he was about to sit, Olivia shouted, “Watch out! Corner!”

He threw himself into his seat as she rounded the corner without stopping, and while he was tossed around a bit, he managed to grab hold of an armrest with his free hand and keep himself from being dumped onto the floor.

The Durg still held tight to the front of the van, and its mandibles continued clack-clack-clack-ing away at the glass. It had made some progress during the brief time Kevin had been gone, and now several cracks cut through the windshield. So far the glass still held together, but Kevin knew they didn’t have much time left. While he’d been getting the extinguisher, he’d more than half hoped the Intervention Team would show up and take care of the Durg for them. But no such luck.

He sighed, and without turning to look at Olivia said, “Do your best to keep the van steady.”

He thought she might give him a snarky reply, but she didn’t say anything. He then pushed the button to lower the passenger-side window. It came down slowly—far too slowly, it seemed to him—and wind rushed in, bringing with it a stink that made him gag. It was the smell of rotting meat combined with the stench of fresh feces, and he knew what he smelled was the odor of the Durg. He had an insight to the creature’s nature then. It wasn’t merely a carrion eater. It was an everything eater, a thing whose sole purpose was to break down existence as swiftly and efficiently as it could. It was a servant of the Gyre, perhaps in a way even part of it, an avatar of sorts. That meant the creature was diametrically opposed to everything Maintenance stood for, and it had to be stopped—even if killing it ultimately increased entropy too. But there was no escaping entropy, no reversing it. All he could hope to do was slow it down a little, make reality last as long as possible. The Gyre was eventually going to devour everything. It was unbeatable. But it didn’t have to gulp its food. It could be made to eat more slowly, its meal seasoned by the extra time it took to ingest it. That was Maintenance’s ultimate goal, hence their slogan: Flavor to the Feast. In a universe doomed to extinction, which had perhaps been born solely for the purpose of becoming food, it was the best they could hope for.

Kevin pulled the ring to activate the extinguisher, then he rose from his seat, leaned out the open window, shouted, “Flavor to the Feast!” and began spraying foam at the Durg.

* * *

Joan put the mail on the kitchen counter along with her purse. She then got a bottle of water from the fridge, opened it, and drank the entire contents in several long swallows. Her stomach was still touchy, and the cold water hit it hard, but she kept the liquid down, and after a few moments the discomfort eased.

Hot damn! If this kept up, she might actually be able to eat something soon.

She tossed the empty plastic bottle into the recycling bin, then walked over to the counter to sort through the mail. She saved the padded envelope for last since it promised to be the most interesting. Water bill, flier for a lawn service, electric bill—which made her think of the cute guy she’d met outside—and a flier filled with coupons for places she never shopped and restaurants she never ate at. She tossed the junk mail in the recycling bin, put the bills to the side, and then finally allowed herself to examine the envelope. It was addressed to her, not to Jon and Joan or Mr. and Mrs. Lantz. Her name was written in black marker, thick strokes, all capital letters. There was something about the handwriting that seemed almost familiar, although she couldn’t say what. There was a number of colorful stamps on the envelope, depicting bright tropical flowers or lush green cacti with needles. A single word accompanied each of the images: Suriname.

She went numb at the sight of the word. She didn’t want to look at the return address, would rather have thrown the damn envelope in the trash—or better yet, take it into the backyard, put it on the gas grill, and flame on! But she looked. Written in smaller letters, but with the same ink and handwriting:

Mark Maegarr

Placidity

Republic of Suriname

She dropped the envelope onto the counter and ran to the hall bathroom. She managed to get there in time to vomit the water she’d just drank into the sink, along with a fair amount of bile. She stood there for a moment, head bowed so she wouldn’t have to look at her reflection in the mirror. She knew she wouldn’t like what she saw. Eventually, she turned on the water to rinse the sink out, took a drink from the faucet to do the same for her mouth, spit, and then returned to the kitchen. The envelope was waiting for her on the counter.

She leaned over to look at it, not ready to touch it again just yet. It looked real enough. The stamps had been cancelled and there were numerous postmarks on the envelope. And no matter how long she stared at the sender’s address, it remained the same. She didn’t see how that was possible, though. She’d only dreamed about Maegarr and Placidity last night, and she hadn’t told anyone about it, not even Jon. Not that he’d be interested. He wasn’t the imaginative type, and to him dreams were meaningless, merely night-static for the brain.

So this couldn’t be a joke. And even if she had told someone the details of her dream, how could they have faked all those postmarks, especially in so short a time? She supposed it was possible. Anything was these days. But who would go to such lengths? And again, she hadn’t told anyone about her dream, so there couldn’t be anyone.

But there was one person who could’ve done it, she realized. And in its own way, the thought was as frightening as if Maegarr had somehow sent her the envelope from beyond the grave. She could’ve done it. She could have sent it to herself. She knew she hadn’t, though. At least she had no memory of doing so. But what if she was, if not exactly crazy, somewhere in the ballpark? She could’ve sent herself the envelope, forgotten about it, and then had the dream about Placidity without knowing she had been responsible for it.

“Listen to you,” she said aloud. “You get one weird envelope in the mail and you’re ready to question your sanity. Suck it up, Buttercup.”

She picked up the envelope without hesitation, and if her hands trembled a little, so what? She tore it open with a single, sure motion, but before she could look inside, warm humid air wafted forth, bringing with it the smells of moist earth and green plants, the tang of sweat and the musk of sex. Her head swam with vertigo, and for an instant she could’ve sworn she stood in a clearing beneath the star-scatter of a clear night sky. Then the smells faded, and with them the impression that she stood anywhere but in her own kitchen. She told herself not to think about what had happened—seemed to happen—yet. Right now she needed to get this over with and see what the goddamned envelope held. She hesitated, as if afraid there was something inside that might bite her. But then she slipped her hand inside, took hold of the contents, and drew them out.

Papers. Old and yellowed, edges curled and torn in places. There was writing on them, ink scrawls done in a cramped hand, the words small and close together, as if whoever had written them wanted to cram as much information as possible onto each page. The ink was thicker in some places than others, and occasionally there were tiny dots or splotches, and she guessed whoever had composed this—clearly not the same person who had addressed the envelope—had done so with an old-fashioned fountain pen. Who knows? Given the aged condition of the paper, maybe whoever it was had used a quill. There were at least a dozen pages altogether, maybe more, all of them written by the same hand. What sort of letter was this? And why send it to her? Then she noticed the pages were numbered at the top right-hand corner, and in front of the numbers on each page were the same four words.

The Book of Masks.

She turned a page over, saw there was writing on the back. Held it up to examine it more closely, saw the ragged edge on one side, as if it had been torn from a book. All the pages had the same ragged edge. She stared at the writing on the page. It was hard to make out, but it was English. It would take a bit of effort to read, but she thought she could manage it, especially with the aid of a magnifying glass. But if she was going to make the attempt, she’d need the aid of something else as well.

She returned the pages to the envelope, set it down on the counter, and walked to the fridge. She opened it and removed a bottle of Shiraz. She’d opened it last night at dinner, but she rarely drank alcohol, only with food, and even then only half a glass or less. So the bottle, which now had a stopper in it instead of a cork, was nearly full. Wine on a touchy stomach might not be the smartest move, but there was no way she was going to read the pages without it. She put the bottle on the counter next to the envelope and opened a cupboard to get a glass. She paused, said to hell with it, and shut the cupboard. She removed the stopper and tossed it onto the counter. Then she picked up the padded envelope with one hand, grabbed the wine with the other, and headed for the bedroom.

* * *

“Broad daylight, and in the middle of the fucking street, no less. Man, you two have got some titanium balls, I’ll say that.”

Kevin didn’t know Royce Bigelow very well. He was a fiftyish African American man with a shaved head and a round face that didn’t match his slender body. He wore the Maintenance uniform, as did the other members of the Intervention Team, including smart glasses. He and his team had an additional element to their uniforms: they were all carrying 9mm Glocks in side holsters.

Kevin and Olivia stood off to the side with Royce as his people worked on cleaning up the scene. They’d placed orange traffic cones in the street around their two vans, and a man was spraying the front of Surveillance Van Number Two with an acrid-smelling chemical he carried in a red container. A rubber tube stretched from the container to a metal rod with a nozzle at the top, and the man moved it methodically back and forth as he worked the sprayer’s trigger. When the chemical hit the mixture of foam and black goo covering the van’s windshield, the mixture started to hiss and smoke, and several seconds later, it evaporated to nothing. A second team member with a sprayer worked the mess on the street in front of the van, with similar effect.

The Durg had already been sealed in a body bag and loaded into the Intervention Team’s van. The team had worn rubbers gloves to handle the creature’s corpse, and they still wore them now, Royce included. Kevin hoped the gloves were an unnecessary precaution. He was covered in so much of the Durg’s black ichor that if it was in any way toxic, he’d likely drop dead within the next few minutes.

“So you really killed the fucker with just a fire extinguisher?” Royce shook his head in wonder. “Like I said, titanium balls.”

“I sprayed foam on the windshield to loosen its grip on the van,” Kevin said. “It still managed to hold on, though, so I used the extinguisher like a club. I had to hit it a number of times before it finally let go. Olivia running back and forth over it is what killed it.”

He looked to Olivia, but she didn’t meet his gaze. She was watching the Intervention Team finish their work.

“Even so,” Royce said, “I have to hand it to you two. Taking down a Durg is no easy feat.” He gave Kevin an appraising look. “You ever think about moving up to Intervention? I think you’d be good at it.”

Now Olivia did look at him, and her dubious expression told him what she thought of his potential as an Interventionist.

“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

Royce went on. “You’re the guy that dealt with Harris last night, right? Tough to lose a partner like that. You heard about him, right? Harris, I mean.”

Kevin shook his head.

“Crazy fucker killed himself in Holding this morning. Chewed off one of his hands when no one was watching and bled to death. His whole fucking hand. Supposedly the shit he bled looked a lot like the crap that came out of the Durg. Pretty damn nasty, huh?”

Kevin heard a voice in his ear then, and from the way everyone else suddenly paused what they were doing, he knew they did too.

“This is Erika. We’ve just received an alert that someone’s called the police and reported ‘suspicious activity.’ You’re ordered to vacate the area at once. Kevin and Olivia…” A pause. “Deanna wants to see you.”

There was a soft click as the transmission ended.

“All right, people!” Royce called out. “You heard her. Let’s go.” He turned back to Kevin and Olivia. “Good luck with Deanna.” He didn’t add You’re going to need it, but he didn’t have to. His grin said it for him.

The Intervention Team headed for the van, but one of them came over and sprayed Kevin with the foul-smelling chemical first. The substance stung his skin and made his nasal passages feel as if someone had stuck burning matches up into them.

“You should be okay,” the woman said. “Just make sure to get your eyes examined once a month and get a yearly CT scan.” She considered for a moment. “Maybe twice yearly.” And then she headed off to join the others.

“I’d shake your hand,” Royce said to Kevin, “but even with gloves on, I’m not touching that shit.”

Then he turned and jogged for his van. Once he was inside, the driver fired up the engine and roared off, leaving the traffic cones behind.

The black goo on Kevin’s power company uniform was already evaporating, but unfortunately large swaths of cloth were vanishing as well. The smell pouring off him was beyond atrocious, and Olivia’s mouth wrinkled in disgust.

“You’re riding in the back,” she said.

They ran for their van.

* * *

When a police cruiser arrived on the scene less than a minute later, all that remained were the traffic cones—half of which had been knocked over as the Maintenance vans drove off—and a large wet patch of some god-awful-smelling gunk in the middle of the street. Adelaide Fletcher had been on the Ash Creek police force for eight years, and she was used to seeing some damn bizarre shit in this town, so a few traffic cones and a strange wet spot didn’t faze her in the slightest. She collected the cones and tossed them into her cruiser’s trunk and then drove off. She didn’t bother taking a picture of the wet spot, nor did she bother to speak to the resident who’d called in the report. There wasn’t any point. Whatever had happened here, it was over. And if it was like most of the weird shit that happened in town, no one would ever learn the truth behind what had taken place. Best to drive away and move on to the next thing and hope that whatever it was, it might at least be normal.

But as Adelaide Fletcher left the neighborhood, a chunk of black goo about the size and length of an index finger—congealed Durg blood that had fallen in the narrow strip of grass between the sidewalk and the curb—began to move, inching itself along like a caterpillar. It moved slowly at first, and then with increasing speed, headed in the direction of the Lantzes’ house.

* * *

When Joan had first climbed onto the bed and started reading pages from The Book of Masks, she’d taken liberal swigs of Shiraz. But she’d become caught up in the strange text and had forgotten all about the wine. She hadn’t been able to find a magnifying glass, so she had to hold the pages close to her eyes to decipher the cramped scrawl. The paper smelled of mildew, and it made her eyes water and itch and her nose run. She’d gotten a roll of toilet paper from the master bathroom and set it on the nightstand next to her. Every once and a while, she pulled off a long section and dabbed at her eyes or blew her nose. She’d taken a hit from her inhaler as soon as she’d started reading, but she’d since taken a second one, and the medicine had left her feeling jittery and on edge.

She remembered The Book of Masks from her dream, and she’d looked it up on the Internet using her phone, but she hadn’t found many references, and those she had found were maddeningly vague. They all boiled down to “largely unknown book of esoteric occult lore.”

She hadn’t learned much more from reading the pages themselves. They were all consecutive, coming from somewhere in what she guessed was the middle of the book, pages 203–218. There were references to concepts she was certain she’d never encountered before, but which seemed strangely familiar nevertheless. Things like Shadow, the Gyre, the Nightway, and the Vast. The pages also detailed a rite of some sort, the purpose of which seemed to be removing a symbolic “mask” that disguised the true nature of reality. But what the ultimate goal of this rite was remained unclear. She felt confident this rite was the same as the one that had taken place in her dream. Some of the phrasing reminded her of the lyrics to “Eat the Night,” and she wondered if Mark Maegarr had used The Book of Masks as inspiration for his work.

When she finished reading the pages, she put them back in the envelope, then wiped her eyes and blew her nose. She went to the bathroom to throw away the makeshift tissues and pee. She then returned to the bed and sat on the edge. She took a drink of wine and thought. She didn’t bother trying to puzzle out if the pages were authentic, and if so, how they’d come to be in her possession. For reasons she didn’t understand, those questions didn’t seem important now. It almost felt like, on some deep level, she already knew the answers. No, the real question was what was she going to do with them?

The easiest course would be to put them away somewhere and forget all about them, maybe even go through with her original impulse to burn them into bits of black ash outside on the grill. It was almost as if these pages—or more accurately, the information contained in the words written on them—was dangerous somehow. As if they carried some manner of disease that exuded a harmful energy, as if they were radioactive. She felt as if she were taking a great risk by simply having them near her, let alone handling the damn things. She needed a long, hot shower, but she knew that no amount of water could wash the pages’ taint from her skin. It was not only on her, but in her, and sinking deeper with every passing moment.

Stop it! she told herself. All this shit is weird enough without your imagination making it worse.

So if she wasn’t going to destroy the pages—and she wasn’t; there would be time enough for that later—how could she use them to help understand what was happening to her?

A voice seemed to whisper in her ear then. A woman’s voice she recognized from her dream. Debbie’s voice.

The basement.

She waited to see if there would be anything else, but that was all.

The basement was definitely part of all this strangeness. So what had the voice—had Debbie—been suggesting? That she take the pages down to the basement, add two bits of weirdness together, and see what happened? She didn’t believe Debbie was real, not in the sense of being an actual individual separate from her. Debbie was only another part of herself, a character conjured by her subconscious. So whatever advice “Debbie” was trying to give her, she was really talking to herself in the end.

So she grabbed the envelope, stood, and left the bedroom. She’d kicked off her shoes before lying down, and she padded barefoot into the kitchen. She walked through it and into the dining room, and through that to the basement door. There was nothing especially sinister about it. It was a plain wooden door without a knob that up until this morning had been hidden by wallpaper. Odd for sure, but that was all.

She opened the door, reached inside to turn on the lights, and headed down the stairs. The unfinished wood felt hard beneath her bare feet, and the concrete floor was cold as ice. A far cry from the South American jungle she had imagined this morning. Feeling more than a little foolish and glad there was no one around to watch her, she slid the pages from The Book of Masks out of the envelope. She sorted through them until she found what she wanted—the section Maegarr had read in her dream. Once she found it, she cleared her throat and began reading.

“To see is to know. To know is to die. To die is to become nothing, and Nothing is Everything.”

* * *

Ash Creek wasn’t a large town by any means, but it always felt that way to Jon Lantz during rush hour. He hated dealing with traffic. It frustrated him to the point where he was yelling at every idiot on the road—or in other words, every damn idiot but himself—and by the time he made it home, he was stressed and irritable and, if he wasn’t careful, he would end up snapping at Joan and basically being a miserable grump for several hours. To avoid this, he usually remained at the store until 5:30, sometimes later, to give the traffic time to thin out. Sometimes he wondered if Joan thought he was having an affair since when he came home later he arrived in a better mood. But she’d never said anything about it, and he figured there was nothing to worry about.

He wondered what Joan would make for dinner tonight. She liked stir-fry dishes and made them a lot. They were good, but sometimes he wanted a more substantial piece of meat. She hadn’t made pork chops for a while, and he thought there were some in the fridge. If she hadn’t started cooking already, maybe he could talk her into making them. He was hopeful that they might have sex later too. But she hadn’t slept well last night because of that weird dream of hers, so she might be too tired. He smiled. Maybe he could talk her into that as well.

As he pulled into their driveway, he thumbed the garage remote. As he saw the door rise, he wasn’t surprised to see Joan’s Mazda inside. She normally arrived home before he did, unless she had shopping to do or it was one of her yoga nights at the rec center. He didn’t, however, see the finger-sized dark object slither from the yard into the garage. If he had, he most likely would’ve thought it was a chipmunk or a mouse. He wouldn’t have bothered to search for the thing. That would’ve been too much like work, and he’d already put in his eight hours and change. Instead, he would’ve left the garage door cracked a couple inches so the little bugger could find its way back outside when it realized there was nothing good to eat in the garage. But he didn’t see the creature, so he pulled in his pickup beside Joan’s Mazda, parked, cut the engine, and pressed the remote to lower the door. He grabbed the plastic bag containing a new set of doorknobs for the basement door, then got out of the truck and closed the door behind him. He walked around the back of Joan’s car and headed for the door that led into the house.

Jon didn’t see the black goo spreading out to cover the doorknob, and when he grabbed hold of it and tried to turn it, his hand slid as if the metal had been smeared with grease. Puzzled, he raised his hand to look at it. His palm was covered with a black smear of something. He wasn’t sure what the hell it was or how it had gotten on the knob. Had Joan—

Before he could finish that thought, thin tendrils extruded from the goop—seven in all, although Jon had no time to count them. They streaked toward his face, and two slithered up his nostrils, one wiggled into his mouth, two dug into his ears, and the last pair plunged into the tiny spaces between his eyeballs and tear ducts. Pain took hold of him then, so intense, so all-consuming, that he couldn’t move, couldn’t scream, couldn’t think. All he could do was stand there, immobile, as the Durg’s foul substance raced through his system, growing as it went, changing him, remaking him. The process was swift, only a few moments, but for the tiny remnant of consciousness that was all that remained of Jon Lantz, the agony seemed to last an eternity. When it was over, there was no outward sign that Jon was gone. His body looked exactly the same as it had before he’d reached for the doorknob. But inside…well, that was a different matter.

His lips stretched into a stiff smile. Not perfect, but it was only his first attempt. He was confident he could get better in time.

The thing wearing Jon Lantz’s body opened the door and stepped into the house.

“Hi, honey!” it said, the words too loud and overly enunciated. “I’m home!”

CHAPTER 6

“Remove the final mask and destroy it, so it may never be donned again, then gaze upon the Truth and know it at last in all its terrible majesty.”

The instant Joan finished reading the pages she felt a wave of warm humid air roll over her, and the basement lights began to dim. The shadows that had up to this moment been content to remain hiding in corners slowly came forward, then—as if emboldened by the lack of resistance they encountered—darted forward, eager to play. They filled the basement from wall to wall, ceiling to floor, blacking out the last few scraps of light until none remained. She had the impression of a great space yawning open above her head, and one by one stars winked into existence until the ceiling—no, the sky—was filled with them. She heard the rustle of leaves in the wind, and if she squinted, she could detect the silhouettes of trees surrounding her. The concrete beneath her bare feet became softer, warmer, until it wasn’t concrete at all but soft earth and yielding grass.

It was like what she had experienced this morning, only this was more present, more real. And instead of fading quickly as it had this morning, it continued, growing stronger and more there with each passing moment. She looked forward, toward what should’ve been an unfinished stone wall, but now—like the ceiling—seemed to open out onto a much larger space. She could see bluish green coldfire torches burning in the distance, could hear the opening strains of “Eat the Night” blaring from speakers.

It felt so real… All she would have to do was start walking forward, and she’d find herself in Placidity. She could join the rest of the Congregation in the Pavilion and listen to Maegarr speak. His words were like music all by themselves, and at the same time they were like a drug. They sounded so sweet, made so much sense, fed a part of her she didn’t know existed, a part that was so hungry.

She took a step forward.

She sensed movement in the darkness around her then, heard a soft shuffling as if numerous bodies had gathered and were moving closer. She heard a metallic clack-clack-clack, the sound cutting to the core of her soul like a blade of frozen steel. Although she’d never heard the sound before in her life, she knew exactly what was making it, and the knowledge scared the shit out of her.

Durg.

The clack-clacking rose in volume and although she couldn’t see them, she knew the Durg were coming closer. The spell of Maegarr’s music was broken, the lure of Placidity forgotten. All that remained to her was sheer, unreasoning terror as the Durg drew closer, closer…

A hand touched her shoulder and she nearly screamed. Darkness fled and light spilled into the basement once more. She spun around—dropping the pages from The Book of Masks—and saw Jon looking at her curiously.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.” He looked down at the pages scattered on the basement floor, along with the padded envelope they’d come in. He crouched and began gathering them together. He glanced at a couple pages before sliding them into the envelope. Then he stood and handed the pages to Joan.

“Looks like interesting reading.”

He smiled then, although it looked more like he was baring his teeth at her. Then he turned and started heading for the stairs. As he started up them, he said, “So what’s for dinner?” This was followed by a soft tapping sound, and she realized he was rapidly clacking his teeth together.

* * *

“It won’t be long now.”

Kevin stood in Harris’s living room, surrounded by the intricate and bizarre bone sculptures the old man had erected. Speaking of erections, Harris sat naked and cross-legged on the floor, his corkscrew pig penis engorged and standing at attention. Kevin noticed then that Harris’s left hand was gone. There was only a ragged stump oozing some thick tarlike substance onto the floor.

“What do you mean?” Kevin asked.

The man’s eyes were wide, as was his grin.

“Things have been coming to a head for a while now. A long while. It’s our task to poke holes in reality, create openings so corruption can enter, break down existence, and hasten the ultimate Dissolution. I did what I could to court the Vast, to bring darkness into the world. But my efforts were poor compared to what he did, and what he intends to accomplish tonight. It’s a comeback performance, one night only, and it’s going to be spectacular!”

Harris’s corkscrew penis swelled, reddened, tightened, and then burst in a spray of blood and semen. The foul mixture splattered onto Kevin, and he staggered backward, frantically trying to scrape the muck off his face. He stumbled into a section of Harris’s sculptures and spun around several times as he tried to extricate himself. But his efforts only managed to entangle himself further, and he ended up ensnared in a web of wire and bone. His feet slipped out from beneath him, but the sculpture’s wires kept him from falling. This was bad enough, but the wires began tightening, pressing deeply into his flesh, the coils around his chest preventing him from drawing in breath. And still the wires continued to tighten, bones pressing against him as if he were growing an exoskeleton. His clothes tore, and his dimpled flesh began to split beneath the wires’ pressure, and dozens upon dozens of cuts opened across his body, and blood flowed in thick streams, pattering on the floor like crimson rain. Kevin wanted to scream, needed to, if only to give voice to the fiery pain that engulfed him. But he couldn’t take in enough air, and his mouth could only gape silently as his life bled away.

Harris—his crotch now nothing but a ragged red ruin—laughed and laughed.

* * *

Kevin’s eyes snapped open, and the first thing he did was draw in a gasping breath. Olivia glanced at him for a moment and then returned her attention to the road.

“Sorry.” Kevin rubbed a hand over his face and was relieved to find it wasn’t covered in blood-cum. “Had a nightmare.”

He’d fallen asleep not long after they’d hit the road, the events of the last day—coupled with his lack of rest—finally catching up with him. He had no idea how long he’d slept, though, or where they were precisely. It was still daylight, but the deep orange quality of the light told him it was closing in on dusk.

Before he could ask, Olivia said, “We’re almost there.”

He hadn’t slept too long then, maybe forty-five minutes at most. It hadn’t nearly been enough, and that fucking nightmare hadn’t helped any. He felt more groggy and tired than he had when he’d conked out. He’d have been better off staying awake for the entire drive.

“Did you know you talk in your sleep?” Olivia asked.

It had been a long time since anyone had shared his bed, and those times had been infrequent and of extremely limited duration. Because of this, he wasn’t surprised that no one had ever mentioned he talked in his sleep.

“Really?” He forced a smile. “I hope I didn’t say anything embarrassing.”

Olivia kept her eyes on the road as she spoke. “You mostly mumbled and I couldn’t make out what you were saying. I did catch one word, though. Joan.”

Kevin felt his face go hot, and he knew he was blushing. He tried to sound casual as he replied. “Huh. That’s weird.”

The corner of Olivia’s mouth quirked up in a near-smile. “Isn’t it?”

They were on I-70, driving through a dull landscape of grassy fields dotted with trees and billboards advertising fast-food restaurants and so-called attractions such as AMISH CHEESE SHOP and HOUSE OF 10,000 PICTURE FRAMES. There was also the occasional religious-themed billboard of the fire-and-brimstone variety, displaying simple messages like REPENT and HELL IS REAL.

Kevin wondered what the people who’d paid for these billboards would think if they understood the universe’s true nature. There was no Heaven or Hell, only the Gyre’s infinite hunger. They’d probably grab one of their many hoarded guns, walk out into the backyard, and blow their brains out. Maintenance wasn’t against religion, though. Far from it. In fact, they did what they could to promote and strengthen it. The illusion that there was more to existence than being food gave humanity the will to keep going, and delaying entropy was Maintenance’s mission after all. Flavor to the Feast.

Kevin didn’t bother to ask Olivia if they’d passed across the state line into Indiana yet. They obviously had since she’d indicated they were close to their destination.

After the Intervention Team had cleared away the Durg, Kevin and Olivia had returned to Maintenance’s Ash Creek office to receive a truly epic chewing-out from Deanna. As angry as she was that they’d provoked the Durg into attacking, she was furious that the incident had taken place out in the open during the day, when potentially dozens of witnesses might have been watching. Because of this, she removed them from surveillance of the Lantz house and said she’d replace them with another team that was less “volatile,” as she put it. But Maintenance was, as always, shorthanded, and it was clear from the readings Kevin had retrieved at the Lantzes’—not to mention the fact that a Durg had been involved—that something major was happening. Therefore, Deanna had decided to broaden the scope of the investigation. She ordered Kevin and Olivia to travel to the Bishops’ new home in Indiana and put them under surveillance. When Olivia asked why Deanna didn’t request an Indiana branch of Maintenance conduct the surveillance, she’d said, “Because I want to get you two as far away from me as possible.”

Olivia hadn’t said anything to Kevin about their humiliating meeting with Deanna. She’d driven him to his apartment so he could shower and get a fresh set of clothes, and they’d set out for Yardley, Indiana, where the Bishops now resided.

Kevin glanced at Olivia. As usual, her face was expressionless as she drove.

“I’m really sorry about what happened,” he said. “I haven’t exactly been batting a thousand lately. I’ll understand if you want to request a new partner after this.”

She continued looking straight ahead as she answered.

“You don’t have anything to apologize for. We were only following procedure by observing the Durg. Everything that happened after that was a consequence of doing our job.” She paused, then turned to look at him. “I admire how you attacked the Durg with the fire extinguisher. It was bad-ass.” She returned her attention to the road quickly then, as if embarrassed.

Kevin smiled. “Thanks. That makes me feel a lot better.”

“Good. Now we just have to make sure we don’t screw up again.”

Kevin noted her use of the word we.

He sighed. Given how fucked-up this whole situation with the Lantzes had been so far, he thought Olivia’s words would prove more easily said than done.

* * *

The last light of day pinked the horizon as they parked down the street from the Bishops’ house. The couple lived outside Yardley, in a rural area consisting of small run-down houses and fallow fields that looked as if they hadn’t been planted in years. The trees were twisted, their bark dotted with patches of discolored mold. The grass was brown and lifeless, as if their region suffered from a period of extended drought, although a quick Internet search confirmed the rainfall in the area had been above average for the last several months.

Kevin and Olivia knew the signs of corruption when they saw them. Kevin wasn’t surprised the Bishops had moved to a place like this. Anyone who’d spent even a small amount of time living in a structure suffused with as much negative energy as the house on Hollyhock Avenue would be affected by it. Perhaps the Bishops needed a degraded area like this to feel comfortable. Joan Lantz hadn’t been living in the house on Hollyhock long—only a couple weeks—but it was bound to have changed her already. He wondered how much and in what ways. He wondered what was in the envelope the Durg had left for her, and what it might have done to her.

The Bishops’ new home wasn’t just a step down from their last house. It was a few hundred, Kevin thought. It was much smaller, little more than a shack, really. A boxy thing with a flat tarpaper roof and unpainted walls, the wood so weathered it looked like it might crumble away to nothing in a strong breeze. The windows were covered with opaque sheets of plastic on the outside, and Kevin wondered if there was any glass behind the plastic or if the plastic was the windows. The house was set back from the road thirty feet, and it had a short bare-earth driveway. An SUV was parked next to the house. The vehicle was in good condition, and it made quite a contrast to the rest of the property.

Kevin and Olivia got their equipment running, and while Olivia sat before one of the computers running scans, Kevin sat at the second workstation, contemplating how he could get close to the Bishops’ house to plant some close-range sensors. The Bishops didn’t have any nearby neighbors. The closest house was a half mile away. The fields surrounding the Bishops’ property were filled with dry knee-high grass and weeds, and not only wouldn’t they provide any visual cover, they would make a lot of noise if he tried to move through them. His only approach was to walk down the road and up their driveway, but he would be easily seen. And he couldn’t disguise himself as an employee of the power or water company. This wasn’t the suburbs where workers of that sort weren’t an uncommon sight. No, he’d have to wait until later, when it was full dark and the Bishops were most likely asleep. So it looked like he and Olivia were in for a long wait until—

Someone knocked on the passenger door.

Kevin and Olivia exchanged looks, but they made no move toward the front of the van. The knocks came again, louder this time.

Olivia stood and, hunched over, made her way to the passenger door. She opened it and said, “Yes?”

A hand reached in, grabbed her by the front of her shirt, and pulled her out of the van.

Kevin didn’t hesitate. He slid open the van’s side door and jumped out. Olivia lay on the ground, looking up at a man who stood over her, pointing a pump-action shotgun at her. The barrel was only inches from her face, and her normally composed expression was gone, replaced by desperate fear.

The man looked to be in his late twenties or early thirties. He had a boyish face, making his age difficult to determine. He had a high forehead, short brown hair, and was clean-shaven. He wore a green button-down shirt, brown slacks, and black shoes. His features were set in a grim expression, and Kevin noted that the man’s finger was on the shotgun’s trigger, ready to squeeze.

“Are you one of them?” the man demanded.

Despite her obvious fear, Olivia’s voice remained steady as she replied. “It depends on who they are.”

Kevin recognized the man from the files Research had provided for them. This was Wes Bishop.

He held up his hands to show he was unarmed.

“It’s okay, Mr. Bishop. We’re not here to hurt you or your wife.”

Wes looked away from Olivia as soon as Kevin started speaking, although he kept his shotgun trained on her. His eyes widened in surprise when Kevin spoke his name.

Kevin went on. “Maybe we could go inside and talk?”

Wes scowled. “How do I know you’re not one of them? One of the Durg?”

“Because neither of us is trying to chew your face off,” Kevin said.

Wes thought about that for a moment before finally lowering his shotgun.

“Fair enough,” he said.

* * *

The inside of the Bishops’ shack was only marginally better than the outside. The floorboards were warped, the ceiling needed patching, and everything smelled of mold and rotting wood. There were only three rooms—a living-dining area, a small bedroom, and a closet-sized bathroom. The Bishops had nothing in the way of decorative touches. No photos, art, knickknacks or curtains, and the walls were unpainted. Now that they were inside, Kevin could see that the windows were boarded up with thick pieces of wood. Their furniture was minimal and so ratty it looked as if it had been salvaged from a dump: a small table with two chairs, a stained and threadbare loveseat, and a faded throw rug in front of the door. They had no kitchen, only a chipped basin sink with a rusty faucet and handles, and a counter with a hot plate on it. Instead of a refrigerator, they had a large plastic cooler resting against one wall. The place was so primitive-looking that Kevin was surprised they had electricity, but they did. The single floor lamp that provided the shack’s sole illumination proved it.

Allison Bishop sat at the table. A pretty woman with shoulder-length black hair, she appeared to be around the same age as her husband. She wore a white dress with a light gray sweater over it. Like her husband, she eyed Kevin and Olivia with suspicion.

Wes stood behind his wife, shotgun held at his side, ready to bring it up and fire at a moment’s notice. Olivia sat at the table with Allison—at Wes’s insistence—leaving Kevin to stand on the opposite side of the table from where Wes was. Wes had excellent shots at both Kevin and Olivia, but this hadn’t been difficult to arrange. The inside of the shack was so small and bare, there wasn’t any cover or any place to hide.

As soon as the four had gotten settled, Wes had demanded to know who Kevin and Olivia were and what they were doing spying on him and his wife. Kevin was fully conscious of the fact that both he and Olivia still wore their smart glasses, and while the Analysts were most likely not watching a live feed from them at the moment—the real action was at the Lantzes’ home back in Ohio—he knew everything they said and did was being recorded for later review.

Maintenance employees had one directive above all others that they had to obey, regardless of the circumstances, or they would be, as it was referred to in official Maintenance parlance, voided. Kevin didn’t want to die, euphemistically or otherwise, and he didn’t want Olivia to die, either. By answering Wes’s questions, Kevin would put both himself and Olivia in danger from their own people. But then again, Wes was the one holding the shotgun, and Kevin figured if he didn’t tell the truth—all of it—the man would kill them here and now.

So he began talking.

Olivia kept shooting him dark looks as he spoke, and he thought that if Wes hadn’t been armed, she might well have attacked him to shut him up.

He did his best to give Wes the short version, but he was nervous and it took him the better part of thirty minutes to finish. Neither of the Bishops interrupted or asked questions. They listened quietly, and when Kevin was finished, Allison said, “It’s happening faster than I thought it would.”

She sounded sad as she spoke these words, and her husband stepped closer and put a hand on her shoulder. She smiled wearily and reached up to cover his hand with her own.

“What’s happening?” Olivia said.

Allison continued as if Olivia hadn’t spoken.

“We didn’t have a choice. He made us do it.”

“He watches,” Wes said. “Not all the time, and he can’t always see clearly from where he is. But that’s the thing. You don’t know when he’s watching.”

“Or how much he can see,” Allison said. She looked at Olivia and Kevin. “You can’t know what it’s like.”

Kevin didn’t say anything, but he reached up and touched his smart glasses.

“That’s why we moved here,” Allison said. “This whole area is entropically compromised, and we thought the negative energy would conceal us from him—especially since the bulk of his attention would be on Joan.”

“Before we moved out of the house, we put up some wallpaper,” Wes said. “It wasn’t much, I admit, but we were afraid to do anything more.”

Kevin and Olivia exchanged looks. So far, neither of the Bishops were making much sense. Kevin wondered if their time exposed to the negative energy in the house back in Ash Creek had caused their minds to degrade.

Allison looked at Wes. “I told you it wouldn’t work.”

He shrugged.

Olivia furrowed her brow and pursed her lips tightly. Up to this point in their brief working relationship, she had struck Kevin as unflappable. But it looked like her patience was finally reaching its end.

She slapped a hand on the table, the sound making the Bishops—as well as Kevin—jump.

“Who in the hell is he?” she demanded. “What’s wrong with you people? Why can’t you speak plainly and clearly?”

Allison scowled and she opened her mouth to reply, but she was cut off by a sound—multiple sounds—coming from outside the shack. More precisely, from all around the shack. The blood drained from her face and she bolted from her chair, grabbed hold of her husband, and held him tight. She buried her face in his chest, but Kevin could still make out her words when she said, “They’ve found us.”

This time neither Kevin nor Olivia needed any explanation. The sound coming from outside was both familiar and extremely unsettling.

Clack-clack-clack-clack…

* * *

“What is this?”

Jon was looking down at his plate with a bemused expression.

Joan looked across the table at him.

“It’s a new recipe I thought I’d try out. It’s called spaghetti.”

She waited for him to say something back to her for being a smart-ass, but instead he leaned his face closer to his plate and inhaled.

“Smells…interesting.”

So his response to her was to be a smart-ass back. It wasn’t like him to be playful, but she decided to play along. She could do with a distraction after the crazy bomb that had suddenly exploded all over her life.

She took a sip of Shiraz. There’d been enough left after this afternoon for them both to have a glass with dinner. Jon hadn’t touched his yet. That was a bit strange too. He wasn’t an alcoholic or anything, but he usually polished off half a glass before starting his meal in earnest.

“Use that metal thing—the one with the three tines? You need to kind of wrap the spaghetti around it first, though. It can be a tricky maneuver, so if you don’t want to work that hard, you can just lift the plate to your mouth and dump it all in at once.”

He straightened in his seat and looked at his silverware. He reached a hand toward the fork, but then he hesitated, as if he wasn’t sure he’d identified the correct utensil. He eventually picked it up and held it to his face, turning it this way and that as he examined it.

She’d made garlic bread, broccoli, and salad to accompany the pasta. Normally Jon would wolf down a piece of garlic bread before eating anything else. But he’d paid no attention to the rest of the food. Tonight it seemed he only had eyes for the spaghetti.

She smiled. It was nice seeing him goofy—on purpose—for a change.

He glanced from the fork to the spaghetti several times before finally putting the utensil down, picking up the plate, lifting it to his mouth, and doing as she’d suggested, dumping it all in at once. Marinara sauce and pasta spilled to either side of the plate, striking his shirt and pants with thick wet plaps, leaving large clumps of sauce on his clothes before the mess finally fell to the floor.

Jon lowered his plate. The bottom half of his face, nose included, was smeared with sauce, and big strands of spaghetti hung from his mouth. He frowned and spit a large mouthful of spaghetti and sauce onto the table, then tossed the plate after it.

“This mouth is too small for that technique to work,” he said. “It would be more effective if the long things were cut into smaller segments before being served.”

Joan had been about to take another sip of wine when Jon dumped the spaghetti all over himself. Her mouth hung open, the glass touching the edge of her bottom lip. She sat frozen, struggling to process what had just happened. She could imagine Jon being silly and playful, sure, but only to a certain degree. But she could never have imagined him doing something like this. Was something wrong with him? Was he sick? Had he experienced some sort of stroke? Was he on drugs?

But as he looked at her, sauce dripping from his chin like bright blood, gaze unreadable, expression neutral, she realized that whatever had happened to him, it was part of everything else. Her dream, Mark Maegarr, Placidity, the pages from The Book of Masks…

The glass slipped from her hand, forgotten. It hit the floor and shattered in a spray of red wine and glass shards.

“I-I’m sorry,” she said, not taking her eyes off him. “I’ll clean it up. Why don’t you take off those clothes and toss them in the washer? Don’t start it, though. Those stains will have to be treated first.” She spoke rapidly, words tumbling out of her mouth seemingly of their own accord. She moved away from the table as she spoke, facing Jon the entire time. He continued to sit, but his head swiveled to follow her as she continued moving away from him and into the kitchen. She had no specific plan for escape. She just needed to get away from him—now.

Jon stood and turned toward her. He smiled then, his teeth a slash of white cutting through red marinara.

She almost ran then. She wanted to—God, how she wanted to! But this was her home, and ever since she’d had that dream last night, it had been under assault. She didn’t know why it was happening or what force was behind it, and she didn’t care. She’d lost homes twice before, and she’d be damned if she was going to let it happen a third time.

Part of her mind thought, Twice? It was only once.

But another part, the one that spoke with Debbie’s voice said, Forget about that. The fucker’s coming for you!

It was true. Jon was walking toward her.

Her first instinct was to grab the biggest, sharpest knife she could find, but despite how bizarre he was acting, Jon was still her husband, and she didn’t want to seriously hurt—or even kill—him if she didn’t have to. She’d used a pot to boil the spaghetti, a steamer for the broccoli, and a cookie sheet for the garlic bread. They were all still out, all within reach, but none would make an effective weapon. But she knew something that would. She knelt in front of the cupboard beneath the stove, opened the doors, reached in, and withdrew an old-fashioned skillet. It had belonged to her grandmother, who had raised her after her parents had been killed—at least until she’d died two years later. After that, Joan had lived in a series of foster homes until she’d turned eighteen. She didn’t use the skillet that often, only on special occasions, and this seemed like a pretty damn special occasion to her. She stood and hefted the skillet in a two-handed grip—she’d forgotten how heavy it was—and brandished it before her like a weapon.

Jon, still smiling, continued toward her, walking in a measured, unhurried pace.

“Don’t make me do this, Jon.” Inside she was screaming, but the hands gripping the skillet’s handle were steady.

His smile widened.

“I’m not Jon anymore.”

And then he came at her.

* * *

Kevin wished he had a gun. And when the Durg began scratching and biting at the outer walls of the shack, he wished he had a whole fucking armory. A fire extinguisher wasn’t going to cut it this time.

Olivia looked at Wes.

“How much ammunition do you have for that gun?” she asked.

“Not enough,” Wes said. His mouth was set in a grim, determined line, but his gaze was that of a man who, while willing to fight, knew he didn’t have a chance of winning.

Allison released her husband and started toward Kevin. Her face was streaked with tears, but fury blazed in her eyes.

“This is your fault!” she said. “He wouldn’t have found us if you hadn’t come here! He followed you!”

“Allison…” Wes said.

She spun away from Kevin to face her husband. “Don’t call me that! Don’t call me Ashley, either! My name’s Monica!”

Wes Bishop looked at his wife, and his entire body seemed to sag, as if what little fight remained to him had fled. He walked over to Olivia and handed her the shotgun—which Kevin couldn’t help feeling was more than a bit emasculating for him, even though he’d never fired a shotgun before in his life.

Wes then went to Allison and enfolded her in his arms. A hitching sob racked her body, and she said, “I don’t want to die again, Brian. Not because of him.”

Wes held his wife as he looked at Kevin and Olivia. “He figured out what we did to try to protect Joan, pathetic as it was. He doesn’t forgive.”

The scratching and gnawing sounds grew louder as the Durg’s efforts intensified. Kevin feared they didn’t have much time left. They needed a plan, and they needed it fast. But before he could even begin to start thinking, the first Durg broke through the wall near the couch. The human-sized insect came scuttling toward them, mandibles snapping, eager to tear into flesh. Olivia aimed the shotgun, pulled the trigger, and the Durg’s head disintegrated in a burst of black ichor. Olivia chambered another round.

“How many rounds left?” she asked.

“Seven,” Wes—or was it Brian?—answered. “There are more shells in the drawer under the hot plate.”

“I’ll get them,” Kevin said. As he ran toward the not-quite-a-kitchen, another Durg came through a hole the first made. Olivia shot that one too, as well as a third that broke through next to the door.

Five rounds left, Kevin thought.

He found a box of shells where Wes said they’d be. He was disappointed at how light the box felt, though. A half-full box was better than nothing, but a full box would’ve been best.

He hurried to Olivia’s side as three more Durg broke into the shack. She managed to kill two of them, but only blew a single leg off the third. The loss of a limb didn’t slow the creature down, and it avoided them and scuttled straight toward the Bishops. At first Kevin thought this was because the Durg feared the shotgun, but then he realized the creatures had been sent by the mysterious Him to kill the Bishops. That didn’t mean they would spare Olivia and Kevin, but they wouldn’t attack them until Wes and Allison were dead.

Wes pushed Allison aside and stepped forward to the meet the Durg’s attack. The insect slammed into him, almost knocking him down, but Wes managed to stay on his feet. He grabbed hold of the creature’s head, fighting to keep its furiously snapping mandibles from cutting into his flesh. The Durg flailed at him with its five remaining legs, which—while not as deadly as its mandibles—had small but sharp spines protruding from them. The spines shredded Wes’s clothes, raked his skin, and blood flowed.

Kevin knew what had to be done—the only thing that could be done.

“Kill them,” he said to Olivia.

Olivia had the shotgun aimed at Wes and the Durg, but she hadn’t fired yet, presumably fearing she might accidentally hit Wes. She turned to look at him, disbelief on her face.

“We can’t stop the Durg,” he said. “They’re going to kill them no matter what. But we can make their deaths easier.”

Olivia looked at him for a moment, then she nodded, aimed the gun, and fired.

Wes’s head became so much shredded meat, and the impact of the blast knocked him—and the Durg—to the floor. The insect immediately climbed on top of Wes’s body and began gouging out large chunks of flesh and ingesting them.

Allison screamed. Some of Wes’s blood had splattered onto her, dotting her face, sweater, and white dress.

Durg flooded the shack then, coming through already existing holes or making new ones. The shack shuddered and swayed, and Kevin knew it wouldn’t be long before the entire ramshackle structure collapsed.

Allison was still screaming as the Durg came at her, and Olivia shot her between the shoulder blades. Blood sprayed the air and Allison’s arms flew upward, almost as if she were beseeching some higher power for help that would never come. As the Durg swarmed over her and pulled her to the ground, Kevin thought, One shell left.

He thrust the box of shells toward Olivia.

“Reload,” he said. And then he started toward the mass of Durg savaging Allison’s corpse.

Olivia spoke as she began inserting shells into the shotgun. “What are you doing?”

“We need her head.”

The floor of the shack was filled with Durg now. They clustered over Wes’s and Allison’s bodies, mandibles clacking and legs scuttling, as they worked to strip every last shred of meat from the Bishops’ bones. Kevin hoped it wasn’t too late. Wes’s head was unusable because Olivia had destroyed his brain. But Allison’s head had been intact when she was pulled down. He hoped enough of it remained to be of use.

Heart pounding and stomach roiling—and really wishing he had time to chew several dozen antacids first—Kevin moved toward the Durg clustered over and around Allison’s body, kicking at the insects to drive them off. Several snapped at him, ripping his pants legs, and one managed to tear a gash in his calf. It hurt like blazes, but he ignored it and kept kicking.

A shotgun blast thundered and one of the Durg atop Allison flew backward. Kevin stepped back then, and Olivia kept firing until she’d cleared away most of the insects on Allison. Kevin moved back in. The woman’s body had been torn apart, reduced to a mass of loose meat, splintered bone, and blood. So much blood. A third of her skull was exposed and only half her face remained, but it looked as if her brain was still where it was supposed to be. Her head was still attached to the remnants of her torso, but when Kevin gripped it and pulled, it came away easily, like a piece of overcooked chicken. The head was slippery with blood, and Kevin cradled it against his chest with both arms to prevent it from slipping out of his hands.

He looked back over his shoulder at Olivia. “Let’s go!”

She’d reloaded once again, and as she joined him, she continued blasting at the Durg, clearing a path to the door for them. When they reached it, she kicked it open, and the two of them ran into the Bishops’ yard and headed for the van. Kevin looked back and saw the shack was covered by Durg, all of them tearing at the walls and the tarpaper roof. He faced forward once again, so he didn’t see the shack finally collapse beneath the Durg’s weight, but he heard it.

They reached the van and got in. Olivia tossed the shotgun in the back and climbed into the driver’s seat. Kevin sat in the passenger seat, Allison’s head resting in his lap, her blood soaking into his pants. At least my pants will match my shirt, he thought. He was in the process of putting on his seat belt when Olivia fired up the engine, put it in gear, and stepped on the gas. Tires squealed, the van fishtailed, and then they were roaring down the road. Several of the Durg broke away from the main mass covering the ruins of the shack to pursue them, but they couldn’t match the van’s speed, and Olivia easily outdistanced them.

“That, as they say, was too damn close,” she said. She glanced over at Kevin. “You okay?”

“One of the fuckers got me on the leg, but I don’t think it’s serious. I’ll take care of it.”

The van had a full med kit, and it wouldn’t take him long to clean his wound and put a dressing on it. “But first, we need to continue our conversation with Mrs. Bishop.”

He undid his seat belt and, crouching, carried Allison’s head to the back of the van.

* * *

Joan swung the skillet as Jon came toward her. He brought up an arm in time to block the blow, but she’d swung the iron skillet so hard that something in his arm snapped. He didn’t seem to notice, though, and he brought up his other arm, made a fist, and punched her in the face. She’d never been hit like that before in her life, and surprise struck her almost as hard as the actual blow. Her head snapped back and white light flashed behind her eyes. She staggered backward, but she didn’t lose her grip on the skillet. She was dizzy and she felt something warm and wet trickle over her lips. Was her nose bleeding? Probably.

Jon moved in for another strike, but she swung the skillet wildly. She didn’t aim, but she got lucky. She hit Jon on the jaw and heard another sharp crack, but the injury seemed to cause him no more pain than the blow to his arm had. The right side of his mouth went slack, but the left side of his mouth twitched upward in what she thought was an attempt at a smile.

Then he hit her again, and she felt her legs collapse beneath her, as if her bones had suddenly turned to water. Darkness rushed in to claim her as she fell to the floor, and she had time for one last thought before she lost consciousness.

I’m going to kill him.

CHAPTER 7

Surveillance vans were equipped with tech that agents might find useful in the field. Some of it was used fairly regularly, such as negative-energy sensors. Other devices were used only in the rarest circumstances, and Kevin employed one of those now. He held Allison’s head with one arm while he withdrew a gray plastic case from the van’s equipment locker. He then sat cross-legged on the floor, wincing as his wounded leg complained, and put Allison’s head in his lap. He opened the case to reveal an electronic console with a shallow depression. He pushed a button to power up the machine, and then pushed another. A metal spike emerged from the depression, and Kevin placed Allison’s head on it. The head shook with the van’s vibrations, but the spike held it in place well enough. He then pressed a red button next to the depression and hoped enough of Allison’s brain remained intact for the revivifier to work with.

The machine began to hum as power built, and then there was a loud zzzz as that power was channeled through the metal spike and into Allison’s head. Her mouth stiffened and her remaining eye snapped open.

“Allison! Can you hear me?”

Her eye rolled in his direction, but before she could say anything, her mouth went slack once more and her eye closed.

“Fuck,” Kevin muttered. He waited several moments and then pushed the red button again. The revivifier hummed once more as power built and was then discharged into Allison’s head for a second time. Her eye flew open and she took in a gasping breath. Or rather, she tried to. Without lungs, breathing wasn’t an option for her. She wouldn’t need to breathe to be able to speak, though. The revivifier would stimulate her vocal cords sufficiently enough for them to produce sound.

Kevin heard Olivia speaking. At first he thought she was talking to him, but when he glanced over his shoulder, he saw she was talking on her phone. He assumed she was talking to Deanna, filling her in on what had happened to the Bishops and asking what they should do next. Kevin didn’t care what Deanna would say, though. He knew what they had to do. They needed to return to Ash Creek and help Joan. But to do that, they needed more information.

Most of Allison’s scalp was gone, and what remained was a patch of skin with blood-matted hair on top. One eye was gone—the socket empty save for a bit of optic nerve. Her nose remained, although it had been broken and shoved to one side, the skin swollen and discolored. Her lips had been scratched in places but were mostly intact, and when her mouth opened, Kevin saw that she was missing several teeth. She only had one ear, on the same side as her surviving eye, and he leaned closer to it as he spoke.

“Can you hear me, Allison?”

Her eye focused on him, and she blinked several times, as if she was having trouble seeing him. A slow sound emerged from her lips.

“Fffffffffffff…”

He leaned his ear closer to her mouth.

“Yes? What is it?”

“Ffffffffuck you! I didn’t want to die again, and I sure didn’t want to be brought back as a goddamned severed head! I’m not even a full head, am I? I can’t see or hear on my left side. Why would you do this to me?”

“I’m sorry we couldn’t protect you, but—”

“Protect me? You and your partner killed me by bringing the Durg to us. Maegarr never would’ve found us if it wasn’t for you!”

“Who’s Maegarr? What’s going on? Please tell me so I can stop it.”

Allison let out a cynical laugh.

“There’s nothing you or anyone else can do to stop him. He’s worked toward this night for decades.”

“Maegarr.”

“Yes. Do you know about Placidity?”

Kevin shook his head, and so Allison told him the story of Mark Maegarr and his followers, how they moved to Suriname in the seventies, founded a pseudo-religious colony, and ultimately died horrific deaths there. The more she spoke, the more familiar her story sounded to Kevin. He thought he’d read about the massacre at Placidity before, but he was certain he’d heard Mark Maegarr’s music. His existential themes of entropy and the ultimate meaninglessness of existence spoke to those who worked for Maintenance, making Slogeny a favorite band among their people.

“Maegarr believed that if the universe was destined to end, it should do so as soon as possible. That way a new and better universe would be born. A paradise.”

Kevin didn’t say anything, but his doubt must have shown on his face, for Allison said, “We bought into his bullshit hook, line, and sinker. But when he summoned the Durg to kill us and we crossed over into Shadow and then beyond, we knew the truth. Our spirits didn’t fuse into a bright sword of energy that would cut a deep wound in the universe, causing it to bleed out. We were nothing but more food for the Gyre and whatever lies beyond it.”

“The Vast,” Kevin whispered.

Allison continued as if he hadn’t spoken.

“We all sensed the truth at once. Maegarr, in his madness, refused to believe it, and he fought to keep us together with the force of his will. But one of us—a woman named Debbie—managed to escape. He’d killed her before he’d finished the rite, and to my shame, Brian and I helped. Do you know what her crime was? Sending a letter back home to her family so they wouldn’t worry about her. But that was high betrayal to Maegarr. As far as he was concerned, the Congregation was supposed to be our one and only family. After Debbie’s spirit escaped Maegarr, it fled back to Earth, where it was reborn in physical form as a baby who would one day grow up to be Joan Lantz.

“Maegarr was furious, and he blamed the failure of our mission on Debbie’s lack of faith. He believed that all of the Congregation’s souls were needed to kill the universe, and if he could get hers back, then his plan would still succeed. He imprisoned the souls of the Congregation inside himself, but he allowed two of his most trusted servants—the man and woman Wes and I once were—to help him reclaim Debbie. We were skeptical after what had been revealed to us about the Gyre, but Maegarr’s will is so strong, and in the end we agreed to help him. He sent the two of us back to Earth, and using his mystic knowledge to bend time itself, Wes and I were reborn several years before Debbie. I became her sister Ashley and Wes became my boyfriend Billy. We killed Joan’s parents. Mine, too, at that point. Thanks to Maegarr’s power, we retained some measure of our memories and original personalities. The plan was to deliver a psychological blow to Joan so strong that it would weaken her mind and shatter her psychic defenses. Then we would kill her, releasing her spirit and allowing Maegarr to regain control of her. But he underestimated her strength and determination, and although devastated by what we’d done, she avenged her parents’ deaths by killing us both.

“Maegarr was so angry with us, I thought he would hurl us into the Gyre for sure. But instead, he decided to try again. He sent us back to Earth, where we were reborn as Wes and Allison. This time, instead of attacking Joan directly, Maegarr decided to go slow and create a trap from which she couldn’t escape.”

“The house,” Kevin said.

“Complete with a basement portal to Placidity. Not the real one, of course, but a re-creation Maegarr carved out of Shadow’s substance. It’s where he waits for her.”

The revivification process was a temporary one. Even with the right technology, entropy could only be held at bay for a short time. Allison was already beginning to show the strain. The remaining flesh on her skull had begun to sag, the skin becoming gray and mottled. Her eye had clouded over, and her speech had become mushy, as if her tongue had started to rot. Kevin knew she wouldn’t last much longer. He had to hurry.

“And what will Maegarr do once he has Joan?” he asked.

“He will claim her spirit and add it to the others. He believes that once the Congregation is together again, once it’s whole, he can use us to finally make his plan come to fruition. He will poke a pinhole in the universe, causing entropy to speed up, like a balloon leaking air.”

Her speech was slower now and slurred. Kevin feared she had only moments left.

As mad as Maegarr’s plan sounded, could it actually work? If Maegarr could harness enough spiritual energy and if he used the knowledge he’d obtained from his occult studies… Yes, it just might. The universe tended toward entropy already and had since it had first come into existence. All it would take is the right push in the right place at the right time to speed it up. Precision was the key. Like cutting a diamond, he thought. And Maegarr’s decades as a spirit had granted him perspective and insight he could never have possessed while alive. He might not have been able to accomplish his goal back in 1981, but it could well be a different story now. There would be no rebirth and no paradise to come after, though. Just the endless nothing known as the Vast.

“Why did you betray Maegarr and try to help Joan?” he asked.

“We might have been dead, but we still continued to learn. To grow. We eventually came to understand that what Maegarr was doing was wrong. We did not have the strength to openly disobey him, but we attempted to thwart him in small ways. I kept telling Joan about problems with the house—making most of them up—in the hope that she’d decide not to buy it. But she wanted a home of her own so badly, one to replace the childhood home we’d taken from her. And, although she wasn’t aware of it as Joan, to replace the home she’d lost as Debbie when the Congregation died at Placidity. When the sale went through, we tried to hide the basement. For all the good…it…did.”

This was it. Kevin got down on his hands and knees and spoke close to Allison’s ear, which was now dripping in fleshy strands, as if she were made of melting wax. He wanted to make certain she heard his next words.

“How can we stop Maegarr?”

Allison’s mouth moved slowly, but no sound came out. Her broken nose began to liquefy, and her lips drooped and then peeled away from her face, landing on the revivifier’s console with soft plops. A hissing sound came from between teeth grown black and rotten. Kevin thought it was a word. He wasn’t sure, but he thought it sounded like Joan.

Allison’s head shuddered once, then became still. The rest of her flesh oozed off the skull, and her brain came with it, a gray-green sludge that joined the rest of the muck on the console. But even that didn’t last long. As the seconds passed, the viscous mass dried up and crumbled away to dust. The skull did the same. Cracks fissured through the bone, and it fell away from the metal spike that had held it upright. The fragments turned to dust, and then the mound of tiny black pieces that marked all that remained of Allison’s head slowly evaporated in curls of mist that vanished almost as soon as they touched the air. Within moments, the console was clean, and no trace of Allison remained.

Despite the horrific nature of what had happened to Allison, Kevin couldn’t help being awed by witnessing entropy in its most primal form. It was one thing to talk about entropy in the abstract, to work to delay it, to say “Flavor to the Feast” as if it meant something. But seeing Allison’s head dissolve into nothing drove home why Maintenance did what they did. Maybe the most they could accomplish in the end was a delaying action, but that was worth something, wasn’t it?

Kevin turned off the revivifier. The spike retracted automatically, and he closed the case and returned it to the equipment locker. He then moved back to the front of the van, took the passenger seat once more, and buckled himself in. He then gave Olivia a quick rundown of what he’d learned from Allison.

“That poor woman,” he said. “She died once at Placidity, then again in Joan’s childhood home, once tonight when the Durg attacked her and you shot her—at my suggestion, I admit—and now she died again after I brought her back to answer my questions. That makes four deaths in all.”

“That’s a lot of dying,” Olivia said.

Kevin nodded. “For a man who supposedly wants to speed up entropy, Maegarr seems to spend a lot of effort trying to defy it.”

“You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet,” Olivia said.

“I suppose. But this is more like using a lot of little eggs to break one very big one.” He turned to look at her. “Was that Deanna you were talking to on the phone?”

“Yes. I called to tell her what you were doing, and she contacted the Analysts and told them to switch to a live feed from your glasses. They heard what Allison said. Unless I miss my guess, we should be—” Her phone rang. She removed it from her pants pocket and answered it. “Hello. Yes. Yes. I see. All right. We’re on our way now, and we’ll return as soon as we can.” She ended the call and slipped the phone back in her pocket.

“What did she say?”

“She’s ordered an immediate strike on the Lantzes’ house. We’re to return to the office for debriefing.”

It made sense. They were still twenty minutes or so away from Ash Creek, and the situation was too dangerous to wait. Yes, Joan’s life was at risk, but potentially the continued existence of the entire universe was at stake as well. Any delay could prove disastrous. Besides, Olivia and he were Surveyors. Their job was to keep watch and gather information. And yet, he knew he had to be there tonight, to bear witness to what happened, if nothing else. Maybe it was because he wanted to prove old man Harris wrong, that he wasn’t going to confront the Vast this night. But mostly it was because he’d gotten to know Joan Lantz. They’d met only briefly and had spoken little, and while he’d certainly found her attractive, it wasn’t as if he’d fallen in love with her at first sight or anything foolish like that. It was simply that, for the first time since he’d started watching people for Maintenance, he’d made a personal connection. And however tenuous that connection might be, in a strange way, it made him feel responsible for Joan. Returning to the office wasn’t an option.

“Let’s go to Hollyhock Avenue,” he said, then added, “as fast as we can.”

Olivia shot him a look that said she thought the suggestion he’d made was equal parts stupid and insane. She’d warmed to him a lot since they’d started working together, but now she adopted her previous persona—cold, detached, and by-the-book.

“We’ve been given our orders.”

“I just want to see her again and make sure she’s okay. That’s all.”

Olivia scowled and continued driving in silence for several minutes. Finally, she said, “I suppose we can swing by the house, maybe check in with the Intervention Team and offer our assistance. Deanna will be pissed, but I hope not too pissed.”

Kevin smiled in relief. “Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me yet. Whatever’s going to go down at that house, it’s not going to be good.”

Kevin’s smile fell away. He settled back into his seat, looked out the passenger window at the darkness outside the van, and tried not to think about what Olivia had said.

* * *

The first thing Joan became aware of was the pounding pain in her head. She would’ve loved to slip back into unconsciousness to escape it, but it hurt too much, and little by little the pain forced her back to full awareness. She opened her eyes and greenish blue light stung them, setting off a fresh burst of agony in her skull. She squinted to shut out the worst of the light, and tried to determine where she was.

It was dark, and the green light came from torches set at regular intervals around a large structure resembling a park picnic shelter. The Pavilion, she thought. From my dream. Was she dreaming now? She had to be, except the humid air felt real, and so did the sweat beaded on her skin. Not to mention the pain pounding in her head. The left side of her face hurt too, and the skin felt tight and swollen. She thought something had happened to her to cause it, but she couldn’t remember what.

She lay on her side on the Pavilion’s dirt floor. She tried to sit up, but the motion made her headache pound twice as hard, and she gave up. Besides, she seemed to be immobilized, wrapped in something from her shoulders down to her ankles. She slowly inclined her head to get a look at what bound her, but at first she wasn’t sure what it was. Strips of soft, spongy material, slick and wet.

It’s skin, she thought. I’m wrapped in strips of skin.

She inhaled, smelled sweat and blood, and her stomach lurched. The only thing that prevented her from vomiting was the thought of how much more it would make her hurt.

She lay near the Pavilion’s platform. The speakers were in place, as was the podium, black circle painted on the front, an open book resting on top. The Book of Masks. But there were hideous new details. A dozen men and women hung from the Pavilion’s rafters, wrists bound by heavy rope, feet dangling inches from the platform’s surface. They were all naked, and strips of skin had been torn from their bodies. A wave of revulsion shuddered through her as she realized where the skin that enwrapped her had come from. The men and women hung limply, heads lowered, blood running from their wounds and pattering to the platform beneath them. She didn’t know if they were alive or dead, but she didn’t see how anyone could have survived what had been done to them. She felt herself retreating toward unconsciousness, but she fought it. Her instincts told her that, despite all appearances, this wasn’t a dream, and if she hoped to survive, she needed to stay alert and calm —although the latter seemed unattainable given the circumstances.

She heard sounds then. Rustling in the grass outside the Pavilion, soft clack-clack-clack noises growing louder as whatever was making them came closer. She didn’t know what those sounds meant, but they filled her with far more terror than seeing the bodies hanging above the platform had.

She sensed a presence nearby, and despite the pain in her head, she wriggled around until she could see who or what it was. Jon stood behind her, face and clothes still covered with marinara stains. His lower jaw hung slack and was discolored and swollen. He tried to smile, but the most he could manage was to make his upper lip curl in a decent approximation of an Elvis sneer.

“Glad to shhee you’re 'wake, honey. We wun’t want 'u to mishh out on all d’ fffun.” His words were hard to understand because of his injured jaw, but she could make them out.

She repositioned herself until she lay on her back looking up at him. Her head still hurt but not quite as much as before. She turned to look behind Jon and was shocked to see that the pewlike wooden benches weren’t empty. They were filled with naked men and women—hundreds of them—young and old, children and adults. There were so many some had to stand or sit cross-legged on the ground. They were motionless, silent, but then they couldn’t have made sounds if they’d wanted to, for their faces were gone, replaced by patches of smooth, bare skin. She remembered something Maegarr said to her in her dream. You’ve been deceitful, Debbie. You’re nothing but masks, one over another. No masks for these people, not anymore.

“They’re not really my Congregation. Their spirits reside with me now. They’re merely echoes formed from the substance of Shadow, as is this place.”

She turned toward the platform—no, she decided to think of it as it really was: a stage—and saw Mark Maegarr standing at the podium, the partially skinned bodies hanging behind him like slabs of half-butchered meat. She’d seen photos of Maegarr when she’d researched him on the web, but those images were of a much younger man, before he’d broken up Slogeny, left music, and traveled to Suriname. He looked far different than he had in her dream last night too. He wore the same clothes—aviator sunglasses, overlarge Hawaiian shirt, cutoff jeans, sandals—and he still had long white hair and a salt-and-pepper beard. But he was much thinner now, cadaverously so, and his lips were drawn back from yellowed teeth in a permanent rictus. As she watched, he removed his glasses, folded them, and tucked them into his shirt pocket. He had no eyes, only twin hollows of darkness from which black tendrils emerged, undulated gently as if testing the air, and withdrew.

He disgusted and terrified her in equal measures, but she didn’t want him to know how much he got to her, so she tried to sound calm as she said, “And I suppose you’re an echo too?”

He didn’t smile—she wasn’t sure he could the way his mouth was—but his eye tendrils emerged and undulated rapidly, giving the impression he was amused.

“I’m the real deal, Joannie-girl. Or should I say Debbie?”

She didn’t understand what he was talking about—except she did. It was as if she had split in two. One of her was Joan Lantz, wife of Jon (who at the moment wasn’t exactly himself), drug-dependency counselor, and new homeowner. And one of her was a woman named Debbie Garcia, mega-fan of Slogeny, follower of Mark Maegarr, member of the Congregation, and long deceased.

She experienced a dizzying moment where she didn’t know which woman she was, or if she even existed at all. But then the two parts of herself joined together and merged, and when she spoke next, it wasn’t with Joan’s voice or Debbie’s, but a blend of both.

“You’ve spent a hell of a lot of time and effort trying to get me back, Mark. I didn’t know you loved me that much.”

“I did love you, Debbie. Just as I loved Brian and Monica. Yeah, I loved every member of my flock, but you three were special.”

Images flooded her mind then, memories that belonged to Debbie. Memories of alcohol and drugs, but most of all sex among the four of them. There wasn’t anything they didn’t try, from the most tender and loving of intimacies to the most debased and degrading acts. It had all been the same to Debbie. Whatever Maegarr wanted, Maegarr got. The Joan part of her was filled with disgust. Not so much at the acts themselves, but at Debbie’s all-too-eager willingness to give herself over to another’s desires regardless of what she wished. It was a denial of self, almost an annihilation of Debbie’s personality, leaving her nothing but an empty shell, a doll for Maegarr to use however he saw fit.

“So special that you were willing to feed us to the Gyre along with the others, right?” she said.

“Only so you might be reborn into Paradise!” Maegarr’s eye tendrils jerked spastically, an indication that he was upset, she assumed.

“Once we were dead, we could see the Gyre for what it was,” she said. “There’s nothing after it. Nothing at all.”

“You’re wrong, darlin’.” He stretched out a hand. “Come with me, and I’ll show you.”

For the last several minutes while she’d been speaking, she’d been wiggling and straining against her grisly bonds, trying to loosen them so she could slip free. But despite being slick with blood, the flesh strips held her tight as a constrictor’s coils.

“Who are those poor bastards hanging behind you?”

Maegarr lowered his hand and glanced back at the bodies, eye tendrils undulating wildly.

“Just some busybodies who tried to crush my groove. A friend took the fight out of them, and then the Durg skinned them for me.”

As if in response to hearing their name, large ebon-shelled insects trundled out of the night and surrounded the Pavilion, although they stopped short of entering it. Their mandibles opened and closed, making that disturbing clack-clack-clack sound.

“The original Placidity existed on the edge of Shadow, so I created this version inside it, just a hair’s breadth away from what most losers think of as the real world. This is where the Durg hang out, breaking down the bits and pieces of reality that slip into this dimension.”

“I don’t get it. Why’s Placidity in my basement?”

“It’s not literally in your basement, darlin’. That’s just where the crossing point is. In other words, a bridge. I made most of the bridge from Shadow, just like I made other bridges so the Durg could enter your world when I needed them to. But those were temporary one-way gates. To make this one last, it needed to be anchored solidly in both dimensions, Shadow and Earth. And you did that for me, just like a good little girl.”

She thought of the pages she’d received in the mail. “I did it when I read the text from The Book of Masks in the basement.”

Maegarr nodded. His eye tendrils had retreated for the moment, making his face resemble a skull covered by the thinnest layer of parchment-dry skin. “Those pages served their purpose well, but now they’re back where they belong.” He patted The Book of Masks, then continued speaking. “You thought you could escape me by reincarnating yourself, your spirit latching onto a fetus’s body like some kind of in utero leech. But you couldn’t hide from me forever. I found you, and when I did, I sent Monica and Brian to fetch you. It didn’t work out so well the first time, so I waited a couple decades before trying again.”

The Joan part of her didn’t know what he was talking about. First time? But the Debbie part knew, and now that they were fused, what one knew, the other did. Joan understood that Ashley and Billy had really been Monica and Brian, and that they’d killed her parents as part of Maegarr’s sick plan to get her back. But instead, she’d killed them and survived. But that hadn’t been the last she’d seen of them. They’d returned once more, this time reincarnating as Allison and Wes. These revelations came as a shock to Joan, but all Debbie felt was sorrow. Such madness. Such waste…

Maegarr continued. “Once you’d moved into my trap—I mean your new home—I sent you a dream. I hoped it would rile up the part of you that was Debbie, just enough to make you curious. I gave you a loose thread to tug on, and once you started pulling on it…” He spread his arms wide. “Well, here we are.”

She turned her head so she could see Jon. He stood motionless as he gazed upon Maegarr.

“And him?” she asked. “How does he fit into all this?”

“Something got inside him,” Maegarr said, and chuckled, the sound harsh and grating, like the edge of a dull razor blade being dragged across bone.

It was Joan’s turn to feel sorrow then. Jon was an innocent victim who’d gotten involved in the fucked-up scheme of a dead former rock star/cult leader, and now some sort of alien force had invaded his body—Maegarr’s doing, no doubt—and his mind and soul had been destroyed and replaced. His body might not be dead, but everything that had made him Jon Lantz was gone forever.

“You sound pretty damn pleased with yourself,” she said bitterly.

“Why shouldn’t I? I’ve won, haven’t I?”

“Maybe. But your plans don’t always go the way you want, do they? My parents’ deaths didn’t work out the way you wanted. I killed Ashley and Billy before they could deliver me to you. And instead of weakening me, the experience—traumatic as it was—only strengthened me.”

Maegarr didn’t reply, but for the first time since making his appearance, Maegarr looked unsure, less confident.

“And you didn’t expect Allison and Wes to turn on you, did you? They’d gotten to know me again in their new incarnations, and we became close again. They came to realize that what you were doing was bullshit, didn’t they? That’s why they wallpapered over the basement door. Maybe they had to go through with selling me the house so I’d end up in your fucking ‘trap,’ but they tried to prevent it from springing shut on me. Maybe what they did wasn’t much, maybe it was all they could get away with while you were watching them, but it was something.”

“They failed,” Maegarr said. “And they paid the price for screwing me over. They’re reunited with the rest of the Congregation now.” He tapped his chest with a bony finger. “The gang’s all here.”

So Allison and Wes were dead—again. She’d have to mourn them later. Right now she had her own ass to save.

“You lost control of them. They weren’t yours anymore. You don’t know why it happened, and that bugs the shit out of you, doesn’t it?”

Maegarr looked at her, eye tendrils extended and waving slowly, but he said nothing. She went on.

“Entropy isn’t everything, Maegarr, and it certainly isn’t inevitable. It can be beaten. You want to know how? By us. We can change. Grow. Become something more than we used to be—even after death, if we’re lucky. That’s what happened to me, and it’s what happened to Allison and Wes. You know the reason you’re so goddamn in love with entropy? It’s because you can’t change. Behind your horror-show exterior, you’re the same self-important asshole you’ve always been.”

She’d continued to work on her bonds all this time, and she thought she might be close to getting her shoulders loose. After that, it would be easier to get all the way free. Just a little more…

Her last shot at Maegarr had scored a direct hit, and he came out from behind the podium, jumped down from the stage, and walked briskly toward her, eye tendrils extended to their full length—a good two feet—and thrashing like mad. When he reached her, he crouched down in front of her.

“You’re wrong about me, darlin’.” His voice was a menacing purr. “Can’t you see how much I’ve changed?”

He leaned his head closer and his eye tendrils caressed her face. She couldn’t help it. She screamed.

The tendrils continued tasting her flesh for several more seconds before finally withdrawing back into their sockets. Maegarr stood and looked down at her.

“I was going to conduct the Rite of Dissolution, unmask you, and then let the Durg liberate you from your physical form. But there’s no real reason to hurry. I’ve been patient for almost three decades. I think I can wait a little longer.”

He looked at Jon, or rather, the thing inhabiting Jon’s body.

“What do you say? Up for a little fun before we get down to business? I mean, thirty years is a long time to go without getting some, you know what I’m saying?”

Jon looked down at her. His injured jaw prevented him from smiling, but his eyes danced with dark glee.

“Yessshhh,” he said.

Then the two things that resembled men but were something else entirely came toward her.

CHAPTER 8

It was full dark by the time Kevin and Olivia reached the house on Hollyhock Avenue. A Maintenance van was parked at the curb, and two other vans sat in the driveway.

“Stop,” Kevin said. Olivia gave him a look but did as he asked, pulling behind the van at the curb.

One of these vans should belong to the Surveillance Team that had replaced Olivia and him, and standard procedure dictated that the Surveyors remain in this van during an intervention and monitor the situation. That meant the Surveyors should still be present, and since they would be aware of Olivia’s and his approach, they would contact them to find out what they were doing here. Both of their phones should be ringing by now—but they weren’t.

Kevin turned to Olivia. “Call Deanna and find out what’s going on.” Without waiting for her to reply, he unbuckled his seat belt, opened the passenger door, and got out.

There were no streetlights on Hollyhock, but enough of the residents had their porch lights on, providing at least some illumination to see by. He hurried to the other Surveillance van’s passenger door and rapped a knuckle on the window three times. No one responded. He rapped again, and then leaned his face close to the glass and tried to peer inside. Maintenance vehicles were equipped with tinted glass, and Kevin couldn’t tell if there was anyone within. He tried the door and wasn’t surprised to find it locked. No Maintenance employee would be foolish enough to leave his or her vehicle unlocked, not with the sort of technology they carried inside.

He ran back to Surveillance Van Number Two and climbed inside. Olivia was on the phone with Deanna.

“Yes, I understand. We will.” She disconnected and returned the phone to her pocket. She then turned to Kevin. “Deanna said an Intervention Team entered the house and contact with them was lost. A second team was dispatched, with the same results. The Surveillance Team then disobeyed orders and went inside, and they were lost too. Deanna wants us to assume monitoring duties but under no circumstances are we to leave the van and go inside. She’s requested additional Intervention Teams from the Columbus office, and they should be here within the hour. She sounded nervous. I’ve never heard her like that before.”

“She must be worried if she called Columbus.”

Columbus was the state capital and the center of Maintenance operations in Ohio. Their Intervention Teams were some of the most highly skilled in the Midwest. If she’d called for them, the situation inside the house had to be dire.

“Joan may not have an hour.” Kevin reached behind his seat and grabbed the shotgun they’d taken from the Bishops. He then turned to Olivia and held out his free hand. “Give me the rest of the shells.”

“Do you know how to work a shotgun?” she asked.

“I’ll figure it out,” he said. “Now give me the shells.”

She looked at him for a moment, expression unreadable. Finally, she sighed.

“Hand me the gun and let’s go,” she said.

* * *

They didn’t bother bringing any sensors. They knew the level of negative energy in the house would be off the charts. They’d left their smart glasses behind too. The last thing Kevin wanted was to be distracted by Deanna yelling at them for disobeying her orders. She’d have plenty of time to yell at them later—assuming they survived.

The front door had been kicked open, so they didn’t have to worry about finding a way in. The lights were off inside, and Kevin carried a penlight to illuminate their path. They proceeded slowly, Kevin standing beside and slightly behind Olivia so he wouldn’t get shot if she needed to fire her weapon. The cautious pace frustrated him. He wanted to dash straight to the basement, but they had no idea what defenses Maegarr might’ve set up, and a number of their people had already entered and been lost. They couldn’t afford to be reckless, he knew that, but that didn’t mean he had to like it.

They moved through the kitchen and then the dining room without incident before coming to an open door. There was no molding and no knob, and it was obvious where wallpaper had been torn away to reveal the door. And although Kevin knew it was standard procedure for an Intervention Team to leave a door open in case they needed a quick exit, it still struck him as an ominous sign. The spider extending an invitation to the fly. Two flies, in this case. They paused at the doorway to listen. Kevin didn’t hear anything at first, but he caught the faint, distant sound of rock music. He recognized the tune: “Eat the Night,” from Mark Maegarr’s band Slogeny.

He looked at Olivia, and she nodded. She stepped through the open doorway and started down the wooden stairs, Kevin right behind her, shining the penlight so they both could see. The music didn’t get any louder as they descended, and Kevin had the sense that it was coming from a long way off. A very long way. The air—instead of growing cooler as with most basements—became warmer and more humid, and by the time they reached the basement’s concrete floor, both he and Olivia were sweating. A slow sweep of the penlight’s beam proved the basement was empty. No sign of the missing Maintenance agents, and no sign of Joan Lantz.

“Over there,” Olivia said, nodding toward the far end of the basement.

All Kevin saw were shadows, but when he directed the penlight toward them, they didn’t dispel. They seemed to absorb the light, to pull it in and swallow it whole. And although it was hard to tell, Kevin thought the music seemed to be coming from beyond the shadows. This had to be it, whatever it was. The Intervention Teams—and the two Surveyors who’d followed them—must have gone in there. Or something had emerged to greet them. Neither possibility was comforting. Kevin tried to work out the best strategy for entering the darkness. If the penlight wouldn’t work inside it, then they’d be at a severe disadvantage once they entered. Olivia had the shotgun, sure, but if she couldn’t see to aim it, it would be next to worthless to them.

He turned to Olivia to ask her what she thought they should do, but before she could speak, an emaciated form emerged from the darkness. It was an old man, naked and skeleton-thin. At one time his penis had been deformed, twisted like a corkscrew, but it was gone now, and all that remained between his legs was a dark gash above a pair of dangling mottled testicles. His left hand ended in a ragged stump, the wound raw and wet with black blood. The man grinned as he stepped into the illumination of the penlight beam.

“Told you I’d see you again, Kevin.”

Harris might have been naked, but he wasn’t unarmed. In his right hand he carried a weapon made from bone, a sharp-edged scapula lashed to a femur with strips of dried tendon. Blood coated the weapon and stippled his sagging, wrinkled flesh.

“Your friends walked right into the darkness, and it was so easy to kill them in there. After all, I am a creature of darkness, aren’t I? But I didn’t want to kill you like that, Kevin. We’re old friends, you and I. I wanted you to see my face one last time before I serve you to the Gyre.”

The old man seemed even more insane than he had when he’d killed Barry or even in Kevin’s dream. His eyes twitched, and his facial muscles contorted randomly, as if he were suffering from an ongoing stroke. But as disturbing as Harris’s countenance was, the gore-coated bone weapon he carried was far more intimidating.

Kevin tried to sound calm as he said, “You can’t hurt us. You killed yourself. You’re dead.”

Harris let out a cackling laugh. “There’s dead and there’s dead. I’m the first kind. I’m no longer part of the world of the living, but I haven’t gone on to my reward yet. And there are all sorts of things I can do to hurt you.”

Harris raised his bone weapon and stepped toward them. Olivia shouldered her shotgun and fired. The wound where Harris’s corkscrew cock had been exploded in a fresh spray of ebon blood, and he fell to the floor, screaming, hands clapped to the space between his legs. Kevin looked at her, and she shrugged.

“What can I say? I got tired of looking at his balls.”

Harris had dropped the bone weapon when he went down, and Kevin moved forward to grab it. The femur handle felt mildly slimy to the touch, and he could feel the negative energy that suffused the object. He experienced a deep instinctive disgust that almost made him hurl the weapon away, but he forced himself to hold on to it and stepped back to rejoin Olivia. She kept the shotgun trained on Harris, but she edged away from Kevin slightly, as if she couldn’t stand to remain too close to the bone weapon.

Harris’s screams dribbled off into what Kevin first thought were wrenching sobs, but then he realized the old man was laughing. He lay sideways on the floor, cupping his ruined crotch with his remaining hand, the stump on his other arm jammed up against his wound to also help staunch the blood flow, but it didn’t help. Blood dark as ink ran between his fingers and spread out in a widening pool on the concrete. His face had gone pallid, and it was almost as white as the bone weapon he’d carried.

“You know why I lived close to this house, Kevin? Why I’m here now? It’s because I used to live here myself, back when I was a doctor. An orthopedic surgeon, actually. I did all sorts of terrible things here, right down in this very basement. Always put plastic down to catch the mess, though. I filled this house with so much corruption—what I gather people in your line of work call negative energy—that it was perfect for Maegarr’s needs. This house became rotten enough on a metaphysical level that it was possible to create a passage between this world and the one Maegarr exists in now. So he had two of his helpers buy it off me, and I moved into a new home not far away and started over. I was able to corrupt that one even faster. I’d gotten pretty good at it over the years. After you caught me and I checked myself out”— he removed his handless arm from the blood-soaked hamburger where his genitals had once been and held it up to illustrate his story—“Maegarr was gracious enough to allow me to play a part in his farewell performance. Kind of a thank-you for my contribution to helping set it up. Even gave me a new body formed out of Shadow, even if it wasn’t much more durable than the original. Shame I won’t get to stick around to see his finale, but that’s how it goes. First your money, then your clothes.”

He laughed again, but it soon turned into a coughing fit. Then he fell limp, his head hitting the concrete with a dull smack. His eyes remained opened and staring, and the blood pool—which had been widening steadily as he spoke—stopped its expansion.

“Do you think he’s dead?” Kevin asked.

“Dead or dead-dead?” Olivia replied. “Best to make sure.”

She stepped forward and nudged his shoulder with the barrel of the shotgun. He didn’t move, didn’t blink. Something about this didn’t feel right to Kevin, but before he could warn Olivia, Harris moved with inhuman speed. He plunged his hand into his chest, snapped off one of his ribs, and hurled it at Olivia. At the same instant, she jerked the shotgun’s barrel so it pointed at Harris’s head, and then she pulled the trigger. Harris’s head exploded like a rotten melon filled with black pulp. Olivia’s head then snapped back as the rib plunged through her eye and into her brain. Blood spurted and she stiffened. She staggered backward and—still holding on to the shotgun with her right hand—started to fall. Kevin dropped both the penlight and bone weapon and managed to catch her. He then gently lowered her to the floor.

He was such a fucking idiot! Harris had already become something other than human before he’d killed himself, and his death had only furthered his transformation—especially with Maegarr’s help. Kevin should’ve known he could perform a bizarre trick like the one he’d used to hurt Olivia. After all, bones were Harris’s thing.

Blood trickled around the edges of Olivia’s wound, but the rib was solidly lodged, and it kept the blood loss to a minimum. Not that bleeding to death was her biggest problem right now. He looked at her blood, and a thought drifted through his mind. Guess she’s not a robot after all.

He knelt beside her, took her free hand, and held it in both of his.

“Olivia…can you hear me?”

Her breathing was rapid and she stared up at the ceiling with her uninjured eye. He thought her brain had been too damaged for her to talk, maybe so damaged that she could no longer think. But then her breathing slowed some, her remaining eye focused on him, and she smiled.

“Deanna assigned me to work with you because she wanted me to observe you, assess your performance, and give her my opinion on whether you should be demoted. Or even voided.” Her voice sounded dreamy as she spoke, as if she’d been given a strong sedative and was on the verge of falling asleep. “Do you know what I’d report to her now?”

He shook his head.

“You’re a shitty Surveyor, but you’re a hell of a man.”

Her breathing stopped then, but there was no other indication that she’d died. No tremors in her limbs, no faint groan rising from deep within her. It was as if some unseen hand had simply reached inside her and flicked a switch to OFF. He started to reach out to close her eyes, but then he thought better of it. Olivia hadn’t been the kind of person who would look away as she was being pulled toward the Gyre. She’d rather face it head-on and eyes open. He drew back his hand.

“Flavor to the Feast,” he said softly.

He stood then and retrieved the penlight. He looked down at the shotgun—which Olivia still held—and at the bone weapon. He gently removed the shotgun from Olivia’s hand, and then removed the remaining shells from her pocket and transferred them to his. He thought about taking the bone weapon too, but in the end, he decided against it. The damn thing practically oozed negative energy, and he didn’t want that shit infecting him the way it had Harris. He then turned off the penlight. The light wouldn’t work inside the darkness he was about to enter, so why bother wasting the battery? He tucked the penlight into his pants pocket and headed in the direction of the darkness, careful to avoid tripping over Olivia’s or Harris’s bodies. Given how inhumanly fast the old man had been able to strike at Olivia before he died for the second time, he wondered why Harris hadn’t tried to kill him then too. Maybe Harris hadn’t wanted to make it too easy on him. Maybe he’d known there were worse things waiting for Kevin on the side of the darkness than death.

With that cheery thought, Kevin continued forward, and Slogeny’s music—once so distant—began to grow louder.

* * *

“Wasn’t that fun?”

Maegarr grinned at her with his permanent rictus of a mouth, and his eye tendrils stroked the air with lazy, languid movements. He was naked and covered with scratches and bite marks, a number of which bled. Jon, also naked, stood next to Maegarr. He too had been scratched and bitten, but the substance that oozed from his wounds looked more like tar than blood. She’d managed to hit his injured jaw several more times, and it now hung slack and canted at an odd angle. It didn’t seem to bother him, though. He might not have been able to feel pain anymore, but she sure as hell could. She lay on the ground, naked, free of the strips of flesh that had bound her, but hurting too much to move. She’d fought the two of them the entire time they’d been raping her, and not only did her every orifice feel as if it had been scoured with broken glass, she was covered with scratches and bite marks herself, and her breasts felt as if they’d been used as punching bags. At times her hair had been pulled so hard by one of them that clumps of it had been torn out, leaving her scalp dotted with patches of bleeding skin. Often one had kept hold of her wrists or ankles as the other did something to her, and her thrashing had pulled muscles and strained joints. She’d been hit, too, and her jaw hurt so much, she figured it probably didn’t look much better than Jon’s, and her left eye was so swollen that she almost couldn’t see out of it. She didn’t think she’d lost any teeth, though, so that was something.

She didn’t think she could’ve made it through the ordeal if there had been only one of her. But right now, in this place, she was both Joan and Debbie. She didn’t know if Joan was a reincarnation of Debbie’s spirit, or if Debbie was a separate being who’d somehow merged with fetus-Joan, but it didn’t matter which was true. What was important was that together they were stronger than either had been separately.

She pushed herself up into a sitting position and allowed her chin to drop to her chest. She wanted to look like she’d been traumatized by what they’d done to her and that she would no longer put up any resistance. She wanted them both to be off guard when she made her move. Not that she knew what that move was going to be yet, but she was working on it.

She didn’t respond to Maegarr’s question. Given his ego, she doubted it was rhetorical, but not only did she want to maintain her shell-shocked act, she wouldn’t give the bastard the satisfaction of answering. Maegarr regarded her for a moment, and then he nodded to Jon. The thing that had been her husband walked over to stand behind her. He didn’t touch her, but it was clear that he was there to guard her.

One of the worst things about the entire experience had been the way Slogeny’s music had continued to blare from the speakers the entire time they were raping her. Debbie had once thought of Maegarr’s music as essential to her existence as food, water, and air. Now, if she ended up dying again in this place, she wouldn’t mind, if for no other reason than because she wouldn’t have to listen to that shit anymore.

The music was still playing, but Maegarr gestured and the volume lowered.

“Well, all good things come to an end.” He paused. “Bad things, too.”

His clothes lay on the floor, along with Jon’s and the remains of hers. He didn’t bother putting his back on before walking to the stage, climbing onto it, and taking his place at the podium, the dead bodies hanging from the rafters forming a grisly backdrop for him. He looked out over the crowd of faceless men and women—all of whom had sat quiet and unmoving while he and Jon had raped her. His eye tendrils flicked the air, and he asked, “Is everyone ready?”

The Faceless didn’t respond.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Maegarr said. He looked at Jon next. “How about you?”

Jon got down on his knees behind her and clamped his hands on her shoulders.

“Yesssh.”

Maegarr nodded, then he looked to the side and raised his voice. “Are you?”

The Durg clacked their mandibles together loudly. Like the Faceless, they’d remained where they were during the rape, surrounding the Pavilion, but never setting so much as a single segmented leg inside.

“Awesome!” Maegarr said. “Time to rock!” He looked out at her and spoke in a near-whisper, as if imparting a secret. “The Durg don’t really have a role to play in tonight’s festivities—except to serve as an audience, of course. Every artist knows, it’s the audience that really makes a performance.”

He then turned his attention to The Book of Masks and began flipping through its pages.

He raised his voice again. “You and I are the last ones standing, Debbie darlin’. Soon we’ll join our brothers and sisters, and when that happens, the Rite of Dissolution will be concluded at last. Our sacrifice will tear open a wound in the universe so wide and so deep that it can’t be healed. Entropy will pick up speed, like a snowball rolling down a hill, getting bigger and bigger as it goes. Existence may stagger on for a century or two, maybe even longer. But it will come to an end much earlier than it was destined to. And then we can start over. Everything will be better. You’ll see. We’ll make it that way.”

She kept her head lowered and her voice soft and toneless as she spoke.

“You’ve already died once. You’ve seen the Gyre for what it is. You know there’s nothing after it save an endless void. There will be no rebirth, no matter how many sacrifices you make or how many rituals you conduct. You can’t win.”

Maegarr didn’t respond right away, and she knew she’d gotten to him. She felt a surge of triumph, but she kept her emotion from showing: head down, body limp, her overall appearance that of a woman utterly defeated.

Maegarr surprised her when he finally responded.

“Maybe you’re right, darlin’. But I’ve come too far and sacrificed too much not to finish what I started. Besides, if it doesn’t work, we’ll be no worse off than all the other assholes who died before us.” His voice became colder. “Now shut the hell up and let me get this over with.”

He began reading from the book, the same words Debbie remembered from that long-ago night in the real Placidity, and which Joan had first heard in last night’s dream.

“To see is to know. To know is to die. To die is to become nothing, and Nothing is Everything.”

The music increased in volume as Maegarr conducted the rite, and Jon’s hands tightened on her shoulders. The Durg shifted their bodies back and forth, mandibles clacking in their excitement, while the Faceless sat silent and still. While Maegarr chanted on, she thought of something he’d said earlier regarding the Faceless.

They’re merely echoes formed from the substance of Shadow, as is this place.

This place, this version of Placidity, wasn’t real. Not in the way Joan understood the word. Debbie had studied the occult during her time with Maegarr, so she had a better understanding of that aspect of existence called Shadow, although she knew she only grasped the basics. But they both understood one thing. If Maegarr could manipulate Shadow to create things, then why couldn’t she?

She pressed her hands down on the bare earth floor of the Pavilion and dug her fingers into its moist soil. She closed her eyes and pictured a pair of objects that she wanted to hold in her hands. She concentrated with the power of two combined wills, putting all their psychic resources to the task. The handles would be hard as steel and cool to the touch, their edges so sharp they could cut through stone without becoming dull. And they would be black—as black as Shadow itself. Nothing happened for several moments, and she thought she’d failed. But then she felt the soil growing firm in her hands, coming together, merging, fusing, taking on the forms she desired.

She withdrew a pair of shadow daggers from the ground and smiled for the first time since waking in this place. She thrust the blades behind her and into Jon’s legs. The blades entered his flesh as easily as a hot knife into warm butter. She yanked the daggers free, spraying the air with thick black goo, and then she jumped to her feet.

The music still played, but Maegarr had stopped reading from the book.

She spun around in time to see Jon rise to his feet, black ichor running down the sides of his legs. He moved awkwardly, tottering from side to side, as if his legs might collapse beneath him any second. His features had contorted into a mask of fury, and although the Joan part of her saw no sign of the man she’d married in that face, still she hesitated. This was Jon’s body, and that meant there was a possibility he was still in there somewhere, right? If she killed the creature, would she be killing Jon—the real Jon—as well?

That fucker raped you! Kill him and be done with it!

That was Debbie’s voice, and while the Joan part understood how she felt, she didn’t know if she could bring herself to do it, even if by not killing Jon she brought about her own death.

Jon could barely speak with his broken jaw, but he let out a roar of rage as he raised his hands, fingers curled into claws, and rushed toward her.

She saw something happening out of the corner of her eye, and she quickly glanced in its direction. The air seemed to bend, bulge, and then tear, and a chubby man slipped through the opening. He wore a white shirt stained with blood, black pants, and black shoes, and he carried a pump-action shotgun. She thought he looked familiar, although she couldn’t immediately place him. He stopped when he saw what was happening, and as the rift in space closed behind him, he chambered a shell, raised the gun, and fired.

The meat between the right side of Jon’s neck and his shoulder disintegrated, tarlike blood exploding into the air. The blast spun him sideways, and his injured legs slipped out from beneath him. He hit the ground hard, and although he immediately tried to get up, he’d lost too much blood—or whatever the crap sludging through his veins was—and he slumped back down and lay still.

She turned to look at the man with the shotgun.

“Hi. I’m Kevin. We met earlier today. I was, uh, pretending to be a power company worker, but really I was observing your home because of…of…” He seemed to finally notice she was naked. He broke off speaking, looked her up and down, and—although it was hard to tell in the blue-green light cast by the torches—she thought he blushed. She must have made quite a sight—naked, cut, scratched, bruised, bitten, and holding a pair of night-black daggers. She must’ve looked as much of a monster as anything here.

The Joan part of her remembered him now. The awkwardly cute guy she’d spoken to in the driveway when she’d come home early from work. What the hell was he doing here, and carrying a shotgun, no less? Not that she was in any way ungrateful for his help.

She gave Jon’s body a quick glance. She hoped for his sake that Jon Lantz had ceased to exist the instant the thing—whatever it was—had taken him over. She hated to think that his personality might have still remained somewhere in there, aware of what the thing that controlled his body was doing, but unable to do anything to stop it. Either way, his worries were over now. The Joan part of her would mourn him later. Right now she had work to do.

Kevin was looking around, taking everything in. Maegarr, the Faceless, the Durg… But what really caught his attention was the row of bodies hanging from the rafters behind Maegarr. She wasn’t sure why, but she had the impression that he knew them.

“Your people?” she asked.

He nodded, not taking his gaze off them.

“Want to help me take out the bastard responsible for their deaths?”

Kevin turned to look at her and his mouth formed a grim smile. “Absolutely.”

The two of them turned and began walking toward the stage, she with her daggers, Kevin with his shotgun. She didn’t know if their weapons would be enough to go up against Maegarr, but she supposed she’d find out soon enough.

Maegarr watched them approach, his eye tendrils flailing in agitation.

“This doesn’t change anything, Debbie. All you’ve managed to do is slow me down a little. I’ll have to start the rite over, but that’s cool. My friends will distract you long enough for me to finish.”

He snapped his fingers and the Faceless stood.

“Do you really think they’re going to follow your orders?” she said. “They may only be echoes of people long dead, given form from the substance of this place, but they are echoes of those people. People who died knowing you lied to them, that there is nothing beyond the Gyre but the Vast.”

Kevin turned toward her as she spoke this last word, alarm on his face. She ignored him and continued looking directly at Maegarr.

“Go ahead. Give them a command. Tell them to run forward and tear the two of us limb from limb. Or tell them to rape us in every way imaginable until we’re bleeding to death and can’t move. Go on. I dare you.”

“Uh, Joan…” Kevin said. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

“You heard her!” Maegarr shouted to the Faceless. “Fuck them till they’re dead!”

The Faceless didn’t react.

“DO IT!!!” he screamed.

None of them moved.

She grinned. “Told you. And now I’ll tell you something else. I’m not the same woman you knew in Suriname. And you made a big mistake when you tried to take away my home.” She gripped the shadow daggers tighter. “Say hello to the Vast for me.”

She continued moving toward the stage, Kevin keeping pace with her.

Maegarr’s eye tendrils were waving so furiously now that they looked as if they might shoot out of their sockets. But then they slowed down, until they finally stopped moving and withdrew back into his head. He made a gesture and the music cut off. His shoulders slumped and he let out a long, weary sigh.

“Fuck it,” he said. “Take them. They’re yours.”

At first she thought Maegarr was trying to control the Faceless again, but she realized she was mistaken when the Durg entered the Pavilion and began scuttling toward them from all directions.

She and Kevin didn’t have time to discuss strategy. He started blasting Durg as they came and she sliced and hacked at them with her shadow knives. Durg fell dead around them, and some of the others, caught up in a frenzy of bloodlust, stopped to devour their fellow comrades. But not all. The majority of Durg kept on coming at her and Kevin. She had to protect Kevin twice while he reloaded, and before long he shouted, “I just loaded the last shells!”

Both of them were wounded and bleeding by this point, although none of their injuries were immediately life-threatening. She didn’t see how she and her new ally were going to survive this, though. There were too damn many insects. And behind them, standing untouched on the stage, Maegarr watched them fight on, laughing the entire time. It was that laugh more than anything that made her more determined than ever not to let the sonofabitch win. Not just because of what he’d done to both parts of her—Debbie and Joan—but for what he’d done to so many others. Jon, Allison, Wes, Kevin’s friends, and all those poor people who died in Placidity so many years ago.

And that’s when it hit her. She didn’t know if it would work, but it was the only chance they had. She drew in a deep breath and yelled a single word as loud as she could, putting all her energy, all her will, behind it.

“Help!”

The Faceless had remained motionless after standing, but now they began moving swiftly. They raced forward to engage the Durg, and within moments the Pavilion became a blood-drenched battlefield as groups of Faceless yanked out Durg legs and pounded the insects to paste with their fists, and Durg sank their mandibles into soft flesh, tearing off limbs and ripping out organs.

Maegarr wasn’t laughing anymore.

He grabbed The Book of Masks, tucked it under his arm, then turned and gestured. The air behind him began to ripple and distort, just as it had when Kevin had appeared. Maegarr was preparing to flee.

“Kevin!” she shouted.

Kevin raised the shotgun, aimed at Maegarr, and fired.

Maegarr’s back exploded and he was knocked face-first to the stage. He dropped The Book of Masks and it thumped to the stage near him. The spatial distortion winked out the instant he was hit and it didn’t reappear. The Durg and the Faceless continued fighting, but they no longer seemed to care about Kevin and her. She ran to the stage, hopped up, and hurried to Maegarr. She dropped one of her daggers to free up a hand, grabbed him by the shoulder, and turned him over onto his wounded back. He took in a hissing breath when his shredded meat hit the stage floor.

“Guess that’s what I get for making my new body too real.” He said this slowly, gasping the words out as if he didn’t have much air left. His eye tendrils didn’t reemerge, and she found herself looking into two deep hollows of darkness, and wondering what—if anything—Maegarr saw through them.

“You got me, darlin’,” he said. “I have to admit it. But you know what they say about rock ‘n’ roll. It’ll never die.”

“Want to bet?”

She raised the dagger she still held and brought it down in single swift slicing motion. She then grabbed hold of his hair and stood, lifting his severed head off the stage. She carried it to the edge and held it up high. Black blood dripped from the neck stump onto the stage, making a not altogether unpleasant pattering sound, like rain.

“It’s over.”

She didn’t yell, didn’t so much as raise her voice, but the few Faceless and Durg that still lived stopped fighting and slowly turned to face her. The Pavilion’s floor was covered with mutilated bodies, both Faceless and Durg. Kevin’s shirt was covered with blood and ichor, but he looked well enough for the most part, and he gave her a weak smile.

She tossed Maegarr’s head out into the Pavilion. It landed somewhere among the dead bodies, falling between them and becoming lost to sight. She let her dagger fall to the stage, and then she climbed down and walked over to Kevin. She felt suddenly weary, and she stumbled, nearly falling. Kevin dropped the shotgun and rushed forward, catching her just in time. He held her for a moment, looking into her eyes. And then, as if remembering once again that she was naked, he blushed and let go of her.

“You must be cold,” he said. “I’ll give you my shirt.”

He started to unbutton it, but she reached out and stopped him.

“Don’t bother. Your shirt was already a mess when you got here, and it’s way worse now. Besides, I’m so covered with gore, it would probably slide right off me.”

Kevin looked down at his slashed and blood-stained shirt, then he looked back up at her. He shrugged and continued unbuttoning his shirt, and when he was finished, he removed the disgusting thing and tossed it to the ground.

She started to laugh, but then she saw that his shirt didn’t hit the ground. Instead, it passed through it, as if the ground was no longer solid. Kevin saw this too.

“I was afraid of that,” he said. “Maegarr made this place out of Shadow itself, shaping it through the sheer force of his will. Now that he’s gone, this place can’t sustain itself. We have to return to the real world while the passage back still exists. If we don’t…”

“We’ll disappear too,” she said.

He nodded. “We’ll be absorbed into Shadow, like everything else around here.”

She looked at the surviving Durg. Now that Maegarr was dead, they seemed quite placid. They had begun to dispose of the corpses of both their kind and the Faceless, only they ate slowly, without any hint of ferocity. They reminded her of cows grazing in a field of grass.

“But not them,” she said.

“No,” he confirmed. “They belong in Shadow.”

She looked at the remaining Faceless. They stood motionless once more, and she had no idea if they were thinking or feeling anything at all.

“They’ll disappear because Maegarr made them, even if in the end they refused to serve him.”

“Yes,” Kevin said.

She grew thoughtful then. What would happen to her once she returned to the real world? Would she still be a fusion of Debbie and Joan? Or would the Debbie part of her vanish, leaving nothing behind but a memory that would, in time, fade, as all memories do in the end. She liked this new version of herself, though, and she would be sad to see it go. But there was nothing she could do about it. Unless…

She stepped over to where Kevin’s shirt had disappeared, crouched down and reached toward the spot. Although it looked as if the ground there was solid, her hand passed right through. She withdrew it quickly, afraid that she’d find her hand had dissolved into Shadow. But it was intact. She tried to wiggle her fingers to make sure and was gratified to see they responded. She looked around then. Some of the coldfire torches were gone, as were a number of benches. She looked up and saw empty patches in the Pavilion’s ceiling. She should’ve been able to see stars through them, but all she could see was darkness.

It didn’t have to end this way. She’d been able to create those super-sharp daggers from the substance of this place, and if she could do that, who’s to say she couldn’t do more? She concentrated hard, harder than she ever had before, drawing on the power of her two wills. And then she reached down once more, and this time her hand came in contact with solid earth.

She looked up at Kevin and grinned. He smiled and shrugged.

“I was getting tired of my job anyway,” he said.

CHAPTER 9

Music drifted forth from the speakers. Not Maegarr’s, and not any music that had ever been heard before. This music came from within her, and it was slow, soft, and gentle. The coldfire torches continued to burn around the Pavilion. She’d considered changing their blue-green color, but she’d decided she liked it after all and left them the way they were. She’d left the sky alone as well. She liked the night, found the darkness comfortable, soothing.

She’d resurrected the Faceless, and they sat quietly on and around the benches, listening to her music, thinking whatever thoughts they were capable of. They might be only echoes of people who’d once lived, but that was okay. Echoes had a right to exist too.

The Durg were out there, somewhere beyond the torchlight. She could hear them moving around sometimes, clacking their mandibles once in a while. Shadow was their natural habitat, and they would always be nearby. But she didn’t mind. She was actually starting to grow rather fond of them.

She sat on a comfy couch—a new addition of hers—on the stage, The Book of Masks in her lap. There was a lot of interesting stuff in there, a lot more than Maegarr had ever used. There was a great deal of potential here, and once she figured out how to use the entire book, things were going to get interesting.

She was still naked. She didn’t see any point in wearing clothes here. Kevin was naked too. He sat cross-legged on the stage next to the couch, eyes closed, swaying in time to her music. She still didn’t know exactly who she was. Debbie? Joan? Both? But she’d decided it didn’t matter. She was she, and that was enough. More than enough.

She sighed in contentment. It was good to be home.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tim Waggoner has published over thirty novels and three short-story collections of dark fiction. His previous DarkFuse releases include The Last Mile, The Men Upstairs, and Broken Shadows. He teaches creative writing at Sinclair Community College and in Seton Hill University’s MFA in Writing Popular Fiction program. You can find him on the web at www.timwaggoner.com.

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

DarkFuse is a leading independent publisher of modern fiction in the horror, suspense and thriller genres. As an independent company, it is focused on bringing to the masses the highest quality dark fiction, published as collectible limited hardcover, paperback and eBook editions.

To discover more titles published by DarkFuse, please visit its official site at www.darkfuse.com.