Prologue

  The Hitchhiker

  He turned up his collar though, in truth, it was not all that cold, well did he remember the winters of this place where he had grown to manhood and in his mind, he knew that this cool autumn day was nothing; but years spent in warmer climes had weakened him, and next to the constant dry heat of Iraq or even the humid torture of the mainland, this damp and misty island was a subarctic hell. He would acclimatize, he was sure, but it would take time and fresh out of the army without a job or even a house waiting for him? Time was all he had. He wondered then, not for the first time, what compulsion was bringing him back to this place, this old, worn-out island he had enlisted to escape from even more than to avenge the attacks on the World Trade Center. Funny how time made a mockery of the lies one tells themself. He had truly believed that he was willing to die to avenge people he had never met in a city he’d never been to, but looking back, like much in his life, it had been an excuse, a justification for a motivation he was less willing to admit. If he was honest with himself the only reason he had ever enlisted was that he wanted to leave this town.

  The sound snuck up on him, twisted as it was by the foggy air so that it seemed to come from all around. It hooked into his mind pulling him from his dark thoughts, forcing him to focus on the world around him. It was a car, older but well maintained by the sound of it, and almost on autopilot, he stuck out his thumb. Peering through the fog, he saw the boxy silhouette of a van materializing. It was heading, he was glad to see in the right direction.

  Perhaps he thought I’d even make it home before dark. Home, why was this desolate town home? He didn’t have many friends; he had been a loner before the army. His father was dead, and his mother had sold the house and moved to Florida years earlier. So there wasn’t a family waiting. Was it just that the bulk of his early memories concerned this mist-shrouded town on the far end of this forgotten island? He didn’t know and didn’t have time now to wonder. The van, a rolling anachronism, he saw as he looked at the well-maintained VW Kombi. Flower power paint job and all. It was slowing to a crawl, and he jogged back to meet it.

  The driver was a young man, maybe 25, perhaps a little younger, dressed in a clean, freshly pressed black suit with a priest’s collar beneath a strong, handsome chin. He had a friendly and inviting face however, there was something indefinable about the young clergyman that put him on edge, perhaps it was the mirrored sunglasses that hid his eyes and turned the smile ever so slightly sinister. Or perhaps not, he didn’t have much time to think as the man leaned across towards the open window.

  “Where are you headed to, brother?” The padre’s accent was odd, he thought he had heard every kind of accent during his time in the army, but this guy had him stumped. Western, he guessed by the flatness of it, but beyond that, he couldn’t be quite sure.

  “Whisper Bay,” He said, though the question didn’t strictly need to be asked, walking down this road, Whisper Bay was just about the only place you could be going. The only other town is Whiterocks, the shabby handful of shacks and trailers located on the other side of the bay itself; and that had been almost abandoned when he left to go for a soldier; he doubted it was doing any better now.

  “Well, hop in.”

  He did, throwing his bags onto the seat behind him and settling himself next to the young clergyman.

  “The name’s Summers,” the man said, that odd smile never leaving his face. As he offered his hand to shake.

  “JD,” the handshake was strong but cold as the air around them. JD doubted that the old van had working heat and knew well how the damp air could drain you as if it were a mosquito that lusted after warmth instead of blood. Still, he noticed, and it added in some vague way to his sense of unease at the priest.

  “Well, JD, you look exhausted, when’s the last time you slept?” The man was friendly enough, and without hardly thinking, JD found himself telling that he had been on the road since getting his discharge papers two days earlier. Stealing moments of sleep on the Greyhound and again on the ferry ride across. How he had hitched a ride with a trucker driving a log truck back to Jerusalem from The Port, and then, unable to find a ride south, just started walking, how he wasn’t even sure why he felt the need to return to this place but felt, in some odd way, called.

  “And you, Padre? You ain’t a local.” It was a question in spirit though a statement in form, and the priest was smart enough to realize.

  “You know the old Methodist church out in Mudd Hill?” He’d played around there often enough as a kid, the blackened old stone building a lonesome testament to the forest fire that wiped out the town of Mudd Hill, if seven houses and a church could be called a town, and decimated Whiterocks back in the early seventies. “I bought it a few months back, some… friends have been helping me fix it up”

  “Why?” JD asked, genuinely confused, “I’m sure it’d be cheaper to just build new.”

  “Oh, it would have been,” The man said enthusiastically. “but that old stone Chapel is one of the oldest buildings on the island. I did my research, you see, and it’s been there since before Whisper Bay or Whiterocks were anything more than a few fishermen living near each other for convenience.” He slammed his hand against the wheel to emphasize his point: “Seventeen-Ninety-Nine; It should be on the state register of historic places, you know! But I guess they forgot about Erewhon County, all the way out here.”

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  JD wasn’t sure what to say. Clearly, the young preacher was passionate about it, but to JD. A building was a building was a building, and no amount of age would make it any more or less interesting.

  “So, JD.” The preacher turned fully in his seat to look at him and suppressed a strong desire to tell him to keep his eyes on the road. “Where in town am I takin’ you.”

  “Holden’s Boarding house if it’s still there.”

  “Oh, it is.” The preacher drummed his fingers on the wheel. “Say, why don’t you forget about that and spend the night at Mudd Hill? There’s food on the stove and less bed bugs than Holden can boast”

  “No thanks, I appreciate the offer, but…”

  “But, I’m a stranger you met on the road. A stranger who is also crazy enough to restore a burned-down church?” He said with a smile that seemed to knock years from his face.

  “No, I just don’t want to put you to any hassle.” The true answer was somewhere between those two, and JD was sure both men knew it.

  “Hassle? What are neighbors for brother? And besides, I’m sure my wife would love to meet you.”

  JD weighed his options; this priest was being very pushy, and something about him still made the young veteran uneasy; but what was the worst that could happen? He had a gun tucked into his waistband, and he was certainly bigger than the man. Besides, he’d grown up in Whisper Bay and had a good idea of how awkward it must be for this guy. Not a local, and doing something out of the ordinary by restoring that old church.

  “Alright,” He said, meeting his own eyes in the preacher’s glasses. “but how's about you keep your eyes on the road?”

  They both laughed, the tension evaporating like the mist that was even now clearing around the car to show the town off to their right, where it hugged the coast. They drove on past it, then turned off the highway and onto a country road that itself followed the coastline around the top of the bay, past where Mudd Hill had been, and eventually to Whiterocks.

  The new red and white sign beside the road proclaimed that the old methodist ruin was now the New Life Church, Reverend Edward Summers presiding. It was certainly in better shape than JD had expected, even from the gravel parking lot, he could tell that the new roof was of good quality, and the black marks of the soot were all but gone from the stone face. The high old stone steeple was, however, unchanged from his memory, a sharp needle stretching skyward but ending in a blunted point where the old cross had been salvaged after the fire. Resting now in the town historical society back in Whisper Bay proper. Away across the property sat a doublewide and a small handful of campers.

  “What’s that?” JD asked, nodding towards the ersatz trailer park

  “The bigger one is mine, at least for now. And the campers belong to the friends who are helping me with the repairs.” He spoke absently as he pulled the car into a space before the chapel doors. Stepping out into the damp air, JD watched as the red sun slid down behind the treeline.

  “Edith, we have a guest!” The preacher called out, and JD turned to see who he was speaking to. A woman, the wife he had mentioned, or so JD assumed, with dark red hair and very pale skin, was walking towards them and for an instant, he felt an irrational pang of jealousy for this handsome young clergyman with his beautiful wife. Because beautiful is what she was, not like a model or an actress with a shapely body that would attract and excite but an angel in a Renaissance painting She was one step short of perfect with just enough subtle imperfection to prove she was human.

  “Bringing home strays again?” Edith, the preacher had called her, spoke. Her voice was clear and sweet, with a touch of an older, more aristocratic Southern accent. He took a deep breath and reminded himself that this was the wife of another man and a man who was doing him a kindness at that.

  “You make me out to be so much worse than I am,” Summers said, pulling his wife into a hug as the light dimmed around them. “It isn’t too much worry, is it?” he added, a hint of sheepishness creeping into his voice,

  “No.” She shook her head, “If we run out, I’ll just make you drive into town for more.”

  “Alright!” Summers said, clapping his hands together.

  “Why don’t you show our guest around the chapel while I finish up, it’ll be maybe ten minutes.

  “Sure,” The Reverend Summers said with an easy, at-home voice, and turning he gestured towards the red-painted doors of the small chapel. “Come on, JD. Let me show you what I’ve done with the place.”

  The interior of the sanctuary was lit by small lamps along the walls that cast a warm glow, and the air was filled with the sawdust and paint smells of new construction. Still, something wasn’t right; there was another smell buried under them that JD couldn’t identify. Not what it was, but he knew that it put his teeth on edge. As they walked down the aisle, the priest talked animatedly about the new stained glass windows. One showed the empty tomb, with “Where is thy victory?” in a gothic script that reminded JD of old Newspapers below it. Another, the holy grail, tilted so the red sacramental wine could be seen, ornamental script beneath it reading “This is my blood”

  That’s it!, he thought, A knot forming in the pit of his stomach. He knew what he could smell under the paint and the dust. He had smelled it before, in Iraq, and at that moment he knew that he needed to leave, to run. To get out of this chapel and off this property as fast as he could.

  “Come, stand over here,” Summers said, gesturing forward to a spot before the altar, his voice was suddenly different, hard and cold. With more of the odd buried accent plain now. It was the twanging rhythm of rural Appalachia, but not what you would hear today except in the deepest most remote of hollers. It was old, and in his ears subtly wrong, devoid as it was of any emotion.

  Without wanting to JD did, stepping forward on legs that were suddenly weak. He recognized the smell that had set him on edge, and his body screamed to run. He tried but couldn’t; it was as if he had been lulled into a trance by the low lights, Summers’ soothing voice, and that awful smell… of blood.

  He knew in his gut that there were others in the room now, standing behind him though no shadows played against the wall. It took all his will, but he made his hand fumble for the gun tucked into his waistband, though he doubted it would do him any good.

  “Drop it.” the gun hit the ground and echoed so loudly in the stone chapel that JD almost thought it had gone off.

  “Turn around.” He did not want to, didn’t want to be enslaved by whatever power was at work here, didn’t want to see whatever this man was. For in some animal part at the back of his brain where nothing has changed since the earliest days of our evolution, a voice was now screaming that to look would be death. Even still, he turned as if following this man; this thing’s orders were the most natural thing in the world. As if Reverend Summers was an officer, and he was back to being a fresh-faced recruit. There were twelve of them behind Summers. Thirteen in total, and the unlucky connotations of that number flashed through his mind. They weren’t monsters, not twisted things of writhing flesh. Or demons horned and cloven-hoofed, they were far worse. As JD looked at them, he saw nothing more than thirteen ordinary people, pale-skinned, and standing perfectly still but the same as any others.