1

1

POLICE WERE CALLING him “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 staff-monitored, activity ward computer screen froze her blood when she first glimpsed it.

RITUALISTIC KILLINGS IN BLACKWATER VALLEY, ILLINOIS, WHERE MYSTERIOUS DEATHS TOOK PLACE A DOZEN YEARS AGO

The article itself told of unexplained vanishings and murdered teenagers in and around the Val, from the Crown on down to the Mids, including county hamlets like Davis Junction and Ogletree farther south. It hinted vaguely at how the killer had blinded each victim before dispatching them with a long-bladed knife of some kind, but made it clear that further details of the unsolved crimes were being withheld.

Katie languished under her forced institutionalized psychiatric care (court ordered by a judge) until her twenty-first birthday. Her mother had died young, so she was all alone. Orphaned. No other living relations. And she’d been foolish enough to speak aloud in front of the wrong people about certain things, the things only she could see and hear—anomalies which had plagued her since early childhood, in fact, throughout all her years on this earth.

During her mandated stay at Ransom she was diagnosed with adolescent schizophrenia and depression, even an eating disorder.

The latter due, possibly, to the way she spooned the toasted oat pieces out of her Lucky Charms at the long table in the women’s dining hall. Eating these first; saving the soggy marshmallow bits and her sweetened milk for last. When she had no cereal, Katie sometimes poured her milk over crunchy chow mein noodles in a bowl for breakfast, all snuck in for her without the nutritionist’s knowledge.

Twice she endured courses of electroconvulsive shock therapy while confined at the hospital. Together with the medications, the ECT was supposed to help treat her depression.

But once she got wise to the doctors and their methods and mechanisms, began navigating her way around their tests and their invasive lines of questioning, she started to deceive them. Telling them what they wanted to hear, pressing at their minds ever so slightly, so that there would be no additional meds or “treatments.”

Already having a room to herself, she soon went from sleeping on a low iron bed and bare mattress to having actual bedding: crisp striped linen, and a foam pillow, with a quilted blanket made by one of the lesser mentally disturbed patients. Eventually Katie was cleared to work in the kitchen, and in the laundry. She witnessed the loneliness and despair of the psychotic disorder unit in which she lived, learned to keep this at bay while interacting with the nurses and health facilitators and the other female inmates. She participated in group, learned names and faces around her. Learned the game, and played it well. She learned their tricks. Became a trickster herself when necessary.

And she never spoke again of those bizarre anomalies. Never showed them she was different in any way.

She kept the predators away from her in the same fashion, pushing their minds in different directions when they got too close, impressing her will upon theirs until they retreated in confusion and unease.

When she could, Katie helped some of the more unfortunate lady Bedlamites on the ward, reducing their emotional suffering and fitful midnight tremors for them, healing bruises caused by restraints. She quickly became adept at avoiding the surveillance cameras used to monitor communal areas and various seclusion rooms.

Every night, in her dreams, she experienced the graveyard corruption and howls of Mrs. Wintermute, memories of the Val flooding her nighttime thoughts. All this while mourning the death of her father . . . alone, and in silence.

Katie found herself becoming hypervigilant, aware of everything going on around her, even as she slept. Her special abilities were honing themselves up, a latent power developing within her, altering her, growing more terrifying by each passing hour.

One day she received a letter from Palm Clemency, now Chief of Police in Blackwater Valley, Illinois, asking how she was. Asking for her to come west and visit him when she was able.

What am I told?

Then, late one evening, a mental plea came to her like an arrow shot into her brain, jarring her awake in her bolted-down iron bed: HERE I LIE AND WAIT WITH THE GHOSTS. PLEASE HURRY, PRETTY ONE. YOU ARE NEEDED.

When she turned twenty-one and was officially of legal age, Katelyn Jane Franklin had been discharged. She was given the valuables she’d arrived at Ransom with, along with a lecture about how the hospital bore no liability for her anymore, and the privileges her release entailed. They even had the nerve to bill her for the fourteen months she was held there.

After all, she had been sick but now was well again—they were giving her life back to her, and that didn’t come cheap. Katie had smiled and accepted it with grace and a perfect, rehearsed sincerity. She later tore the itemized billing statement into pieces.

They were lucky she hadn’t burned the asylum to the goddamn ground.

But she couldn’t do that, no. Couldn’t draw attention to herself that way. Not where she was going.

Katie knew what the murdered teenagers in Illinois really were. She instinctively knew they were of different stuff than normal children. The result of unsavory liaisons and matings, they were creatures of organic conception but alien in their natures, birthed surely under bizarre circumstances. Hybrid offspring of something not quite human, not of this realm. Neither evil nor good. Just different.

Like her mother had been. Like her.

She wasted little time collecting the settlement from her father’s life insurance, being held for her at a lawyer’s office, and then depositing the check into the bank account he’d set up for her. Minus attorney fees and the taxes she wound up with close to sixty-eight thousand dollars. From this, she withdrew twenty-five hundred in cash on the spot, the maximum sum the bank allowed for immediate availability on large deposits.

Katie went to the house on Charismatic Lane. There, she retrieved the stained rose glass fragment, still wrapped in red buckram, hidden inside a cubbyhole in the wall. She gathered some belongings together, a few books, her laptop and cell phone, debit card, IDs, high school diploma and birth certificate, some toiletries, some clothing—along with the precious remnants of her mother’s cremains taken from the copper urn, kept in a vial now. Then she took a final walk around the property, locking the place behind her. She didn’t know when she’d see the old Dutch Colonial again, or the tumbledown greenhouse out back.

She visited her father Richard’s cemetery plot one last time. Spoke a few hushed words there.

With everything in three suitcases crammed into the trunk, Katie left Golitha Falls, Maine, and drove west. Following the call . . .

Her father had taught her how to drive before his health had so abruptly turned, before she ever went into the cavernous bowels of Ransom, and he helped Katie get her license and even bought a used car for her. A 2008 Dodge Avenger. Burnt orange. Ready to roll. Ready to motorvate, as he was fond of saying.

She had grinned at this as she’d rolled down the highway.

Richard’s jargon and little catchphrases had always sounded funny to her when she was younger, always made her laugh. They were a comfort during those awkward years after her mother died, a comfort she remembered with great affection.

That awkwardness was gone, though—falling away, being replaced with a swelled anger and a budding sexuality. A taste of newfound freedom.

And a thirst for some torment she could call her own.

When she hit Blackwater, she got herself a room at the same lonesome L-shaped motel near the bypass they had checked into fifteen years ago when she was just six. The former Nightlight Inn was now Pye’s New Look Motor Hotel, and surely had since acquired new management to go along with its new look. As she drifted into an uneasy slumber behind the deadbolted, safety chained door of her lodgings, old memories tried tightening their hold over her. She fought them off, slipping their grip momentarily.

Katie knew the Val’s other missing children were already dead. She had seen them, lingering in the dreary shadows of the tombstone-studded graveyard. There would be more.