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Every Foul Spirit 10
10“REBECCA AVENUE,” muttered Katie, straining her eyes in the dark. “Rebecca—where are you, Rebecca? You twat.”She searched for the street her car was parked on, limping along with Blondie in tow. A police car crept by on night patrol, and again she receded into the fog and waited, keeping the dog out of sight. Her legs almost gave out once but she steadied herself, spurring her battered muscles on, and continued walking.Finally there it was: the burnt-orange Dodge Avenger.She popped the locks with her key remote, letting Blondie hop up into the back seat. Katie slid into the front and sat a moment. In her fatigued state, she felt as if she could put the seat back and become unconscious right there. Instead, she drank from the bottle of spring water in her console holder, poured some into her cupped hand so the dog could drink also.Then she caught her own reflection in the rearview mirror.Digging through her glove compartment, Katie found wet wipes and some napkins and was
Every Foul Spirit 11
11KATIE CARESSED THE small keepsake on a black cord around her neck, the vial containing the last, vestigial ash remains of her dead mother. The feel of it calmed her. I’m flying, she thought as she approached the night-black structure, with its half-collapsed roof and its empty, gaping hole for an entrance. Look at me go.There were specters here. Poisoned. Foul. Insane.Having suffered and died so horrifically within, the ancestral house was theirs—or perhaps vice versa. She could see them in the shadows: a horde of malingering and tortured, crucified souls gathered around the passage, mocking her, anxious to welcome unwary guests into their midst.“Clear out,” Katie ordered them, limping forward, her hands balled into fists. “I’m coming through, so make way. Do not come near me.”They parted suddenly, fearful of her, drawing aside in lunatic tatters to clear a path.Candlelight was flickering inside.Katie invaded the rank, crawling darkness of Shaw-Meredith House. A fou
Every Foul Spirit 12
12“HE’S GONE,”Katie said hoarsely into her cell phone. She sat inside her room at Pye’s New Look Motor Hotel, petting the German shepherd that lay on the bed with her.“Gone? That’s all?” said Palm Clemency on the other end.“Yes. He’s gone.” Gone to the dogs. Katie bit her lip, and cleared her scratchy throat. “He burned in the fire—Cornelius Prichard.”“And he was Vespers? Our killer.”“Yes.”“How do you know this?”“I just know it. Did you find the knife in the field?”“Yes.”Katie took a drink of orange soda and winced. “It’s his. Pritchard’s. He was the murderer, Chief.”“Why? Why’d he do it?”“That I don’t know.”“And he died in the fire that turned Shaw-Meredith House into cinders? How did it happen? Why there?”Katie said nothing for several seconds: “He’s gone, Chief.”Clemency exhaled. “So that’s it? That’s all I’m going to get?”“You have his knife, isn’t that enough?”“No. It is not.”“Well, it’ll have to do for now. Trust me.”There was a pause. “W
Every Foul Spirit EPILOGUE
EPILOGUETHE SLUMBERING MANawakens as he feels something enter him, penetrate his person. It violates him, takes his flesh in unbearable manners. He cries out horribly in the darkness as it works its way inside him, undoing everything, breaking him. Dooming him.I MUST HAVE THIS VESSEL, he hears its voice thunder in his ears, nearly splitting his skull in two.Vessel, the man thinks, not comprehending. Vessel?BODY.He is no longer alone. Whatever this is it is firmly within him. He hears its laughter ...Get out of me, the man thinks. He struggles wildly against it, panicking, and then he screams in torment as the char-blackened entity punishes him with excruciating inner pain, setting each nerve ending alight. The man shrieks and spasms, contorts in agony, until at last his struggling ceases and he has no will of his own left whatsoever.HEEL, PET.All is quiet once again.At length he gets up out of the bed and reels, unsteady on these borrowed legs. He st
Every Foul Spirit PROLOGUE
PROLOGUEA FIGURE WALKSwith grim determination through the dark heart of a silent graveyard. Mindful of her surroundings, she searches, cloaked beneath a canopy of midnight clouds, for one marker in particular. She is young, still a girl really, barely twenty-one, yet she moves between the shadowy tombstones as though completely at home. As if this is where she has always belonged. Home amongst the bones.So, what am I told?She finds the marker she is looking for, the one she’s dreamed of in nightmares—WINTERMUTE—and kneels at the grave. She brushes debris away from the footstone: dried dead leaves, a condom wrapper, a willow tree seedpod.What lies under the ground becomes instantly aware, currents running through its decomposed husk. It tenses and listens for her, eye sockets agape. Its fleshless jaws widen to scream ...The young woman catches it in time. “Shhh,” she whispers. “I’m here. They wouldn’t let me out.”Lips gnashed and gone, finger bones worn awa
Every Foul Spirit 1
1POLICE WERE CALLINGhim “Mr. Vespers”, and the online muckraking sites, the Illinois rags, even a few of the bigger newspapers had followed suit: a serial killer who talked to his own variation of God, chanted psalms over his butchered victims before receding into the night.It’d begun with the disappearance of pets from yards, dogs mostly, going missing down around the South Reach Mids, the extreme southernmost fringes of town. Turning up tortured and lifeless afterward. Soon, this had progressed to children.Three kids dead so far and counting, two more of unknown whereabouts still.Katie Franklin had followed the story from within the walls of her prison at that time, the Ransom Mental Health Facility—formerly the Ransom Sanitarium for the Criminally Insane, back in the high old days of lunacy reform—where she found herself involuntarily committed by the state of Maine after her father’s tormented heart had finally given out on him. The headline floating there on the staf
Every Foul Spirit 2
2THE NEXT DAY, a stranger walked into Blackwater Valley’s redbrick Public Safety Building and straight up to the information desk. She was a long, tall young woman, this outsider, fair complexioned, and elegant despite being lanky, her irises pearly gray in color.Katie scanned the room as she entered, noting the many desks and computers; the dispatcher’s radio in a corner. She took stock of the people, probing their minds, their inner workings. She noticed one of the older deputies staring at her, checking out her rear end and firm thighs inside the faded denim jeans as she passed, the curve at the small of her bare back where her top had ridden up. The ribbon in her dark hair.“Chief Clemency’s office, please?” Katie asked the duty secretary, tugging the hem of her shirt below her waist again. “Name is Miss Franklin. He’s expecting me.”The lady looked her over, pressing an intercom button before her. “Just one moment.”A uniformed black man in his early to mid-fifties came out
Every Foul Spirit 3
3THE KILLER PUSHEDopen the cabinet doors and slinked down from the kitchen cupboard where he slept, then let himself out of his empty apartment into the night.The girl was in her mid-teens, young and pretty, blue-eyed, and worried because her friends had gone on and left her behind in the dark. That’s how the killer found her, and caught her: separated, and alone. In the dark.“Hey—” she said, raising her face up from her lighted phone screen.He grabbed her cinnamon hair and yanked her off the bike she was seated on, wrenching one of her arms right from its socket. When she began to scream in abrupt terror, twisting and struggling wildly, an initialed handkerchief emerged and was stuffed into her mouth. He crushed the smartphone underfoot. Pummeled her face until she sank back, dazed and bloodied from the blows.“ ... the sun knows it’s time for setting,” he chanted softly to some unseen presence. “Thou makest darkness, and it is night ... ”Mr. V
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