Dark Pursuit

In this first book after my Kanner Lake Series I take you on a new and somewhat different rollercoaster ride. In these hills and plunges, rocketing through the blackened tunnels, you will meet new characters upon whose beleaguered heads I’ve wreaked my never-ending havoc.(Poor things—that they should end up in one of my books.)

Those of you familiar with the Peninsula side of the northern California Bay Area will quickly see I’ve wedged a town into rural territory. Gayner lies on the west side of Freeway 280, roughly between Edgewood Road and the town of Woodside. As long as I’m creating people, why not create an entire town as well?

My thanks to Courtney Rants at Zi Spa in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, for her information about the workday and training of a hair stylist. Somehow she managed to do my hair and answer my million pesky questions at the same time. All you other stylists out there—be thankful you don’t have me for a client.

And now, here we go again. You know the drill. Strap on that seatbelt, keep your hands inside the car, and —

Beelzebub, addressing the fallen angels

after being thrown out of Heaven:

The King of Heaven hath doomed

This place our dungeon, …

nor shall we need

… to invade …

What if we find

Some easier enterprise? There is a place …

Of some new race, called Man, …

Thither let us bend all our thoughts, to learn

… where their weakness: …

Seduce them to our party, that their God

May prove their foe, …

… Advise if this be worth

Attempting, or to sit in darkness here

Hatching vain empires.

Paradise Lost, Book II, John Milton

Part 1

Severed

UNTITLED MS.

one

“Ever hear the dead knocking?”

Leland Hugh watches the psychiatrist ponder his question, no reaction on the man’s lined, learned face. The doctor lists to one side in his chair, a fist under his sagging jowl. The picture of unshakable confidence.

“No, can’t say I have.”

Hugh nods and gazes at the floor. “I do. At night, always at night.”

“Why do they knock?”

His eyes raise to look straight into the doctor’s. “They want my soul.”

No response but a mere inclining of the head. The intentional silence pulses, waiting for an explanation. Psychiatrists are good at that.

“I took theirs, you see. Put them in their graves early.” Deep inside Hugh, the anger and fear begin to swirl. He swallows, voice tightening. “They’re supposed to stay in the grave. Who’d ever think the dead would demand their revenge?”

From outside the door, at the windows, in the closet, in the walls—they used to knock. Now, in his jail cell the noises come from beneath the floor. Harassing, insistent, hate-filled, and bitter sounds that pound his ears and drill his brain until sleep will not, cannot come.

“Do you ever answer?”

Shock twists Hugh’s lips. “Answer?”

The psychiatrist’s face remains placid. The slight, knowing curve to his mouth makes Hugh want to slug him.

“You think they’re not real, don’t you?” Hugh steeples his fingers with mocking erudition. “Yes, esteemed colleagues.” He affects an arrogant highbrow voice. “I have determined the subject suffers from EGS —Extreme Guilt Syndrome, the roots of which run so deep as never to be extirpated, with symptoms aggrandizing into myriad areas of the subject’s life and resulting in perceived paranormal phenomena.”

He drops both hands in his lap, lowering his chin to look derisively at the good doctor.

The man inhales slowly. “Do you feel guilt for the murders?”

“Why should I? They deserved it.”

He pushes to his feet.

He pushes to his feet. He slumps back in his chair.

He slumps back in his chair. He aims a hard look

He aims a hard look

The psychiatrist.

Hugh’s hands fist,

He cannot

He can only

He

“Aaghh!” Novelist Darell Brooke smacked his keyboard and shoved away from the desk. All concentration drained from his mind like water from a leaky pan.

His characters froze.

He lowered his head, raking gnarled fingers into the front of his scalp. For a time there he’d almost had it—that ancient joy of thoughts flowing and fingers typing. In the last two hours he’d managed to write three or four paragraphs. Now—nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

King of Suspense. He laughed, a bitter sound that singed his throat. Ninety-nine novels written in forty-three years. Well over a hundred million copies sold. Twenty-one major motion pictures made from his books. Countless magazine articles about his career, fan letters, invitations to celebrity parties. Now look at him at age seventy-seven. Two years after the auto accident and still only half mobile. And wielding a mere fraction of the brain power he used to have.

What good is an author who can’t hold a plot in his head?

As for his once-diehard fans, they were now happily reading King or Koontz or that upstart Patterson.

Betrayers, all. He made a gagging sound in his throat.