Prologue
Thursday, October 21, 2022

4 a.m.

The anguished scream sounded like cloth ripping.

No, not mere cloth, canvas — the canvas sail of some great tall ship, a windjammer staggering in a storm, the fierce gale tearing apart its mainsail.

Or maybe not canvas, not a sail at all. Maybe just a curtain — the one in the temple in Jerusalem that ripped from the bottom to the top when Jesus died.

The scream could have been the cry of either a man or a woman — but it was surely someone in extraordinary distress, a great grief expressed in a single vocal exhalation.

Gabriel Chambers sat bolt upright in bed when he heard it. The sound swelled bigger and bigger in his head until it exploded — shattering all his defenses and freeing his imprisoned Boogie Man. Oh, the monster had escaped a few times over the years, but this was different. This time the sound ripped apart the carefully constructed cage where Gabe had kept it locked away — because this was how it'd started. As a little boy, lying here in this room, in this bed, in this house, he'd been suddenly awakened in the midnight dark by an ear-piercing scream and …

Gabe toppled head first into darkness, tumbling over and over into a mind space occupied by a pale, ephemeral reality, nightmare images and impressions and emotions, a fragmented horror that could not possibly be real. Except it was. At the very core of his being, Gabe was convinced that it was.

Screaming.

A continuous shriek slicing into his temples.

Terror, heart hammering.

Hide!

No, get away! Run!

Dark passageways with the screams nipping at his heels like rabid dogs.

A strobe of light captures an image, a … thing.

It is so unutterably horrifying that it is burned onto Gabe's eyeballs and forever after he will look out his eyes at the world through that image burned into them.

A creature smeared with black blood, a pale, slimy thing, that's a skin-crawling, dead gray with … veins in it.

In flashes of strobing light, it slithers toward him and a tentacle — blue, gnarled and lumpy like a knotted rope — grabs him, wraps around his neck. He writhes to get free. More tentacles. So many he's tangled up, can't escape.

Other creatures come. They crawl down the walls like spiders, dozens of them, hundreds, all sizes. They slither out of the shadows across the floor toward him, all around him, writhing in the black blood, crawling over each other, so many they cover the whole floor. And then they cover him. He sees their open mouths and vicious sharp teeth, curved backward like the fish, so when they bite into his flesh there'll be no escape. Their teeth will rip his face off his head. He can only whisper a dying scream — “Nooo!”

“Noooo!” Gabe screamed — a cry that tore out of his throat in a hoarse whisper. Clamping his hand over his mouth, he sat panting in the tangled sheets, listening.

Another scream. Not a night terror, a human voice. Gabe was fully awake now, a grown man, not a little boy. And this was a real scream, not like the one in his childhood dream that'd fundamentally changed who he was.

When Alexandra Harrington heard the scream, it startled her, caught her by surprise, and she froze in place. She thought about that night, too, about her sick little boy who heard the scream and ran from it … and he'd been running ever since. But this scream was not that. She'd known all those years ago what it was Gabe had really heard, and she knew now who was screaming and why. She understood the pain and sorrow that rode the scream out into the world, too, and she was sorry about that, genuinely sorry.

Olivia Harrington wasn't awakened by the scream. She hadn't been asleep, was lying awake for no reason whatsoever except that, according to her doctor, “as you get older, you need less sleep.” If that was the case, she might as well give up going to bed altogether. She'd been awake that other night, too, four decades ago. She'd gone to help and got swept up in the moment, did a thing she had regretted every single day for forty-five years.

The scream wailed, warbled, and then trailed off into what sounded like a strangled sob. Olivia sat up, swung her feet carefully off the bed, and started feeling around on the floor for her house shoes. She hadn't even found them yet when she heard the second sound. Not a scream this time, a yell from the same voice, a cry with a word in it. A name.

Haaannnnnnaaaah!

That was Cyrus. Here we go again. Only this time, might be he got to her too late.

Family members hurried down hallways in the pre-dawn darkness, climbed shadowy stairs to the big room on the third floor with windows that opened onto an endless expanse of prairie where the sun would paint the eastern horizon a pinkish-golden glow in a few hours. No one saw the figure in the darkened alcove outside Hannah's bedroom door, and it melted effortlessly into the shadows as soundlessly as it had come, so ephemeral that maybe it was never really there at all.