Chapter One

The electric shock of terror would light Denise Holterman up like she’d grabbed a high-voltage wire when the Ugly Man put his hand over her mouth, but right now she was still asleep, her breathing even and steady. It’s possible she sensed his presence when he eased open the door and crept into her bedroom, though, because she stirred, mumbled something in sleep talk. Maybe she even awoke for a second or two, blinked, as the puddle of darkness in the doorway soundlessly became a deeper puddle in the shadows on the wall.

She wasn’t afraid, though. Not yet.

Maybe that’s what she was trying to avoid. Not so much the reality of his presence but the fear that would slice into her chest with a pain she didn’t know existed in the world. Maybe some part of her mind did wake up, did know that a horror beyond her wildest imaginings had entered her world, but she didn’t want to acknowledge it, wanted to stay in denial, shying away from reality, trying to grab those last few seconds of innocent sleep on the precipice of the abyss.

Maybe.

The Ugly Man understood fear. Oh my, yes, there wasn’t anybody on the face of the globe who understood it better. He had made “intimate acquaintance” with a terror that’d stop your heart, except his kept right on beating. Oh, the many times he’d begged it to stop, begged his heart to give out and let him go. But after a while he came to understand that it wouldn’t matter much one way or the other even if it did — that what was happening to him didn’t have anything to do with being alive or dead. It’d be the same either way.

He took one quiet step. Then another. Wanted to get his hand over her mouth before she awoke — oh, not because he cared if she screamed. She could squawk her head off and nobody would hear her way out here. The nearest neighbors were three miles away. No, he didn’t want to miss the sight of her eyes popping open in horror when she felt his hand on her. That was a delicious sight on anyone, but especially scrumptious tonight.

One more step put him at the foot of her bed. She stirred again, rolled over on her back so the puddle of moonlight from the window lit her face in gray light like she was already dead.

The Ugly Man froze. Stared at the form on the bed. Then he let out a wordless cry, a sound like a roar and a wail, a sound no voice should be able to make. The girl on the bed jolted awake — he didn’t get to see the look in her eyes but he didn’t care about that anymore. She screamed, and with surprising speed and agility leapt out of the bed and made for the door. The Ugly Man grabbed a handful of her hair and yanked her off her feet. She fell into her vanity, shattering the delicate mirrored table and sending makeup and perfume and hairbrushes flying. When she tried to stand, he backhanded her and she staggered into the night table beside the bed, knocking the lamp off onto the floor. She tried to keep her balance by grabbing the bedpost, but spun around it and clawed at the wall, pulling the framed cross-stitch of flowers off onto the floor.

He was still making that awful cry, and mingled with her screams it was a sound that would have curdled the soul of anyone who heard it.

But nobody did.

Her panic made her strong and she pulled herself upright and actually came at him, her nails bared, like some wild cat. He grabbed her right hand and flung her onto her back on the bed. Then he reached for his blade. It was always there, never so far away that he couldn’t touch it. Because he had to touch it, had to feel the cold metal, had to watch the images dance.

He lifted it high in the air and brought it down in a slicing stroke that penetrated skin and muscle and bone.

She stopped screaming then, like he had flipped her off switch. But he continued to growl, to howl and roar, to vent the rage out of his soul into the world.

No, not his soul. The Ugly Man had no soul.


Every day that Natalie Karrick could remember had started the same way. Well, not every day. Not when she was sick, or visiting Grandma in Bradford’s Ridge or when it was raining or snowing or sleeting or something like that. But every day that was clear and she was able to, she and Daddy climbed up to the top of the world to “survey God’s whole magnificent creation.” That’s what Daddy said they were doing. Natalie just thought they were looking out over the hollow from the highest point around, the big pile of rocks on Rocky Top Mountain.

But maybe Daddy could see something she couldn’t. Maybe it was possible to see everything God’d created from that one spot, but that didn’t seem likely to her. She’d only just figured out there wasn’t any Santa Claus. Once the teacher showed them a globe and said the world was round Natalie knew wasn’t no way Santa could take presents to every kid on both sides of that globe on the same night. Of course, God was real and Santa wasn’t, but she still didn’t think you could see the whole world at the same time from anywhere on it. But she was only seven. Maybe she’d understand it better next week, after her eighth birthday.

“You sure you don’t want to snuggle up warm in the covers and go back to sleep?” Daddy’d asked her. He asked her that every morning.

“I want to go with you to the top of the world,” she said. She said that same thing every morning, too. But the question and answer were all part of the daily ritual and it wouldn’t be complete without it all.

So the two of them set off when it was still dark, the sun glowing behind the mountain, already after “sunrise” out there on the flat where people didn’t have to wait until ten o’clock in the morning for sunlight. The mist was still hanging gauzy over the creek when they crossed it on the big rocks Daddy’d thrown into it to make stepping stones. There was still dew on the leaves of the red oleander bush when they pushed their way past it and into the woods, climbing up the trail that wasn’t really a trail, just the way they always came.


He should have left her behind. She was going to die anyway. You couldn’t chop off somebody’s hand and expect them to survive. He hadn’t meant to cut her like that. She wasn’t any good to him dead, had to be alive. All of them had to be alive until it was time.

He hadn’t been thinking when he did it. The hot flame of rage, of seeing her there, seeing her face in the moonlight. He couldn’t help himself. There was nothing in him that could curb or temper his rage. It was a force too strong, the force that drove him.

As he watched the blade rise up and slice down, cutting through her all the way, cutting it off, he became aware of the nearness of her warmth and then her blood. And he’d wanted that. He’d grabbed the tie off the bathrobe hanging on a hook in the bathroom as soon as he came back to himself, with her lying there in a puddle of blood as limp as a rag doll. He’d tied it around her arm as tight as he could. The blood stopped spurting out then, just about quit altogether, so she was not going to exsanguinate.

He paused at the word. He knew it meant bleed out, die from blood loss, but he couldn’t remember how he knew that.

The blood wasn’t as good as having her alive, but the Ugly Man liked blood. It was warm and had that salty taste. And he felt a desire in his chest for blood, briefly remembered what that was — desire, wanting something — but then it was gone.

Maybe it wasn’t a bad thing that he’d carted her body off, brought it with him instead of leaving it lying there in a puddle of blood as morning light filled the room.

There was the blood, after all.

He’d had to dig around in her kitchen to find a garbage bag to wrap around her hand to keep from leaving a trail of blood when he carried her out and away. Bloodhounds could follow her scent, but they couldn’t follow his. There wasn’t a dog in the world that could follow his. But he didn’t think they’d use dogs. As far out as the farm was, with nothing but fields around it — moonlit fields he’d had to cross before he made it to the trees — nobody’d think about a kidnapper on foot. They’d be looking for tire tracks, maybe setting up roadblocks, searching people’s cars. Which they couldn’t legally do, but nobody knew that so police got away with it all the time.

By midday, they might organize volunteers to search the woods for her body. They’d know as well as he did that she couldn’t still be alive by then. Maybe he ought to do that, leave the body out there for them to find.

No, he wouldn’t leave her. She was still alive, still warm. He’d keep her while she still had blood.

He traveled swiftly and silently among the shadows of the trees, a puddle of black moving from one to the next. The girl was small, weighed hardly anything, slung over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. That was a good thing because he had a long way to go. He didn’t get tired or anything like that, but he had a sense of using energy and strength and there was only so much of both of them and he would use them until they were all gone. He suspected that would probably be a really long time, but there was no way to be sure of that.

Keeping to the woods, staying out of open fields and meadows, he was as swift as an owl falling down out of the sky on its prey. He never tripped or stumbled, as surefooted as a goat, and he never lost his way. He always knew where he was going.

It might have been a warm night. He didn’t know about such things anymore but the girl had thrown off the covers as she slept and lay in a simple cotton nightgown that was now stained a crimson that looked black in the shafts of early light shining down through the trees. There might have been beginning-of-the-day sounds too, the ones others could hear that he couldn’t anymore.

And smells. There was likely the scent of pine in the air, the aroma of wet leaves underfoot and flowering bushes and wildflowers whose names he didn’t know.

He could almost remember those — warm air and birdsong and magnolias. Almost.

Now, his skin registered only the extremes, ice and fire. His whole being knew nothing but ice and fire.

When he got to the cave entrance, he passed from shadow into darkness and vanished altogether.


Harrelton, Ohio, Police Department Major Charles Allen Crocker was Crock to his friends, and most everybody he met fell into that category eventually. Well, except those he informed solemnly that he was about to “deprive you of your freedom in a significant fashion” — which was what he told drunks, and sometimes he’d be able to get them all the way to the cruiser before they figured out that meant he was taking them to jail.

Crock was a round man without a hair on his head, and legs bowed out so far you could drive a rickshaw between his knees. One of those knees, the one where he’d taken a bullet through the kneecap years ago, was so cranky some mornings it wouldn’t bend at all and others it would collapse right out from under him. In a couple of months, he was going to have to pass the department physical again. How was he going to pull that off? Getting old was not for sissies.

But if you had to do it, here was the place to do it and this was how.

He leaned back in the lawn chair positioned beneath the oak tree in what would be a puddle of shade as soon as the sun cleared the mountain. Looking out over dawn mist rising up off the river, he let out a sigh of pure contentment. Yes sir, coming a week early for Saturday’s festivities so he could get in some fishing was one of the best decisions he’d ever made, knew it the moment he hauled his suitcases into the house that had once belonged to Billy Ray Hawkins and had passed down to his daughter Becca when he died. It was an old farm house with two bedrooms upstairs and two down and, wonder of wonders, it even had two bathrooms, which wasn’t common for farm houses as old as this one. Even one was a stretch, so he was grateful the three “bachelors” — he, Jack Carpenter and Daniel Burke — wouldn’t be taking turns at an outdoor privy. He’d read somewhere that the incidence of black widow spider bites had tanked in the early 1950s and somebody somewhere figured out it was because of indoor plumbing.

Crock had moved his things into the smallest bedroom, the one directly behind the kitchen — figured Jack for the big bedroom that opened off the parlor. He was, after all, the main attraction here so his should be the most spacious digs. Daniel could have his pick of the upstairs bedrooms.

The women — Theresa Washington, Andi Burke and Becca — had arranged to stay at Ariel Murphy’s house. Her father was a long-haul trucker who wouldn’t be back home for a week. Linc had told Crock when they’d had a beer together his first day in town that Rita Murphy, Ariel’s mother, was as excited as all the rest of them. Truth was, she probably ached to spend time with people who understood what’d happened last fall that had turned her eight-year-old daughter into a monster and shoved Rita so far down into a whisky bottle it’d taken six weeks in rehab to get her back on the wagon.

The others wouldn’t start arriving until late tomorrow afternoon.

Crock closed his eyes and conjured up his fantasy, which technically wasn’t a fantasy because all the elements of it were reality. He really was eligible for early retirement. He really did have sufficient resources at his disposal to pull it off. And the one-eyed man named Ike who owned the run-down bait and tackle shop at the top of the hill really would sell the place for a song and let you sing it yourself. Crock’d agreed to watch the store while Ike was out of town today and it didn’t take as much imagination as you might think to consider the place his own.

He could almost see the new sign hanging over the door: Crock of Shad — shad being a bait fish nobody in Central Kentucky had ever heard of but he liked the alliteration and the play on words. He’d run the business just like Ike did — rural Kentucky style. When he wasn’t there, when he went fishing as he had done today, he’d leave the front door of the bait shop open and a cigar box on the counter with twenty bucks in ones and a handful of coins in it. And a note pad beside the box instructing patrons to “Pay for what you got and make change or leave an IOU.”

It was possible for Crock to hear the ring of the bell on the front door of the shop from right here by the river. He shouldn’t have been able to hear it, of course. The oak tree on the bank of the Three Forks River was at least seventy-five yards from the shop and it was a small bell. Nobody could hear a bell ring at that distance — except Crock. And he wouldn’t have been able to hear it without the assistance of Sonny and Cher. That’s what he’d named the hearing aids that translated the garbled noise produced by his strange hearing loss into recognizable sounds and the staccato, missing-key-sounds of speech into words.

And protected him from speech he couldn’t stand to hear.

He shook his head. No. Wouldn’t go there. Absolutely would not go there.

A dead fish floating down stream bumped into the cork that hadn’t bobbed once since Crock sat down. Looked like somebody’s started cleaning it — a smallmouth bass, probably— and then threw it back in. Croc jiggled his line up and down.

“Here, fishy, fishy, fishy. Come to papa. I already invited Linc and Jenny over for supper and you wouldn’t want me to serve them Charlie the Tuna, now would you?”

Crock fancied himself something of a chef, if he did say so himself, and he’d bought two bags full of groceries when he was in Bradford’s Ridge on Monday so he could make his special Cajun rice dish along with a couple of other mouth-watering original concoctions. He wished Jack could have taken off early. Then Crock and Linc could have given him a real sendoff. Not that Daniel Burke — Reverend Daniel Burke — was a wet blanket or anything like that. Still, three off-duty law enforcement officers would bring their own special spin to the celebration. But Jack wouldn’t have had his head in the game if he had come down early. Who could blame him? He was about to make his own fantasy come true.

Crock smiled at the thought. Jack Carpenter was about to make Becca Hawkins his bride. About dad-gum time!

The cork lay still in the slow-moving current as another half-cleaned fish, a yellow sunfish, floated by.

How long does eBook delivery take?

As soon as you complete your purchase you'll receive an email from our partners at BookFunnel that contains a unique link to download your eBook(s) in your preferred format.

Will I be able to read the eBooks on my eReader?

Yes! Our eBooks are compatible with all eReaders, including Kindle, Nook, Kobo, and others.

How do I get my eBook on my eReader?

The download email will provide instructions on how to get your eBook on your eReader. Rest assured, it's a straight-forward process.

If you're struggling, our partners at BookFunnel provide free customer support.