Every Foul Spirit

PROLOGUEA FIGURE WALKS with 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

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

4AFTER GRABBING A late bite to eat with Palm Clemency and his daughter, Cimmeria, Katelyn returned to the New Look. She walked to her door with the folder of news cuttings under her arm, pausing to buy a soda from the vending machines.An old man was standing in the shadows of the motel office’s doorway, drinking coffee out of an almond-colored MOLINE, ILL. stoneware mug. He nodded at her.“Looks like I’ll be needing the room awhile longer, Mr. Pye,” Katie informed him.“No misters, young lady—just Pye,” said the old man, sipping his coffee. He winked. “Happy to have you. You’re the only paying guest in the whole place.” He lifted the cup toward her, his face all creased and wrinkly. “See you in the funnies.”Inside her locked room for the evening, Katie put her cell phone on its charger and opened her can of orange soda. She began going through the photocopies from the manila folder, sitting among their array on the bed, perusing articles that told where the bodies had been foun

6KATIE SAW THEIR huge woolly heads coming over the rise, heard the loud, guttural noises they made as they charged across the open grazing plains. Three massive bison were nearing, dark brown in color, a gigantic bull and a pair of cows; four, really, including the smaller reddish calf tagging along. Katie noted their shaggy bulk as they ran, the short sharp horns.They all stopped abruptly in their tracks, stood unmoving, ghosts in the tallgrass, staring blankly, then one of them broke away from the rest—the giant bull whose rear half was a dirty white, Kate could see now, sable brown fur covering its head and mottling back over its humped shoulders. It came rumbling like a train across the rolling meadow land, leaving the others behind.“Miracle,” Katie breathed, her eyes dreamy-wide, her heart soaring.He was headed straight for them, she realized with some alarm. Right for the boundary fencing and the individuals this side of it. Katie stepped away from the group, who wer

8KATIE SAT IN her car on the darkened road, holding the hand-stained glass fragment in her lap. Her thumb hovered over the darkest of the etchings upon it, the rose with black-red petals. Crucian Crowe. She longed to touch it, stroke its surface, and to feel the climbing roses shimmering and warming to her caress . . . but she hesitated, knowing it would bring them forth, snatching them from their home inside the ancient glass——The Rosarium Glass, world unto itself, sustained by its own garden’s bewitchments, and by the illusive ones partaking of its magic who might or might not be immortals.Katie stopped herself, and wrapped the piece of rose glass within its coarse red buckram again, slid it under the front seat of the Avenger. She got out and locked up the Dodge with her key remote, left the car there with its alarm light blinking. Started walking.She wasn’t even sure where she was—the street sign read Rebecca Avenue.Leaves were moving in the night wind. The