PROLOGUE

PROLOGUE

A 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 away, it shudders in dread anticipation within its clawed coffin inside the grave.

“Sleep,” the woman says, passing a hand over the long-sunken burial mound, and the release begins.

The human shell goes limp in the earth, folding inward on itself. Begins to break down, the magic’s hold slipping. “Thank God,” it croaks thickly from somewhere deep in its putrefied throat, through more than a dozen years of madness and rot. “Hold me. Oh, God. Thank God.” It starts to disintegrate, slowly at first, faster, crumbling into dust and chunky fragments with a final exhalation of relief.

It is done.

Mrs. Wintermute rests in eternal repose—fifteen black, hellish years after her death. After her rebirth.

The woman stays crouched and reaches for the small brown seedpod. She rolls it between her fingers, jarring it awake, cupping it. Opens her hand. The seed has cracked and has begun to sprout on her palm. She puts it into the ground and covers it with cemetery dirt. Standing up, she looks down in the darkness.

A tiny spear struggles to break through the soil. She coaxes it into life, willing it. At last she turns away, gazing at the ruins of the ancestral mansion high in the woodland overlooking town. She watches it with the palest of gray eyes. Shaw-Meredith House squats blind and still, engulfed by ivy, roof half-collapsed now, its entranceway an empty gaping hole.

 . . . Occupied again.

Although derelict, a solitary light is burning in one of the glassless windows, she can see, where once she cowered on a window seat bench as a frightened six-year-old child. Only she isn’t a child anymore. Yet a nightfall wave of cold sweeps down and over her, an unexpected terror which comes suddenly and then passes. Her hand trembles as bright anger rises. A bitterness which has been simmering for years and years inside her, for all things lost.

She touches the small keepsake vial she wears on a black cord around her neck, a vial containing the last, vestigial ash remains of her dead mother. The feel of it calms her, stops her hand from shaking. She turns toward a noise.

The weeping willow atop Mrs. Wintermute’s grave mound has shot up eight to ten feet—a year’s worth of growth already—its branches splitting off, longish silver and olive-green leaves lancing out and dropping, bark furrowing while the roots take hold and spread to cocoon the casket below. She strokes the tree, slowing it, regulating its life force. Then she regards the house once more.

I’m flying, mother, thinks the young woman. Look at me go. Flying at last.

***

Meanwhile, a shape reclines naked and profane upon a great stone chair within the derelict mansion in the woods. It feels the girl’s presence below, senses her meddling: the night music is gone, the buried woman’s sweet torment and titterings ended. No more wails to be had—

The feminine form touches herself and shudders deliciously upon her sculpted throne of mortar and bones.

She knows the girl can see other worlds; observing them even as they observe back. Knows the immense threat the girl poses. She stretches and stands, urinates down bare legs. Dripping in exhilaration, this creature’s wildish floor-length hair lifts and swirls about her as she begins her scheming.

Holding intercourse with the dead.

She calls on something then, calls it forth from some ink-black place into birth, and listens with leering smile as it shrieks out miserably at its own hopeless fate in the darkness of the ruin’s attic above.

“My darling,” she coos to her risen pet. “Come to me.”

***

The woman in the graveyard pauses, milk skinned, chestnut locks whipping with the sudden raw breeze that has sprung up. She feels the shard of ancient hand-stained glass as it shimmers and hums low inside the bag slung over her shoulder, hears a distant wrenching scream—from somewhere inside the falling house, she is certain now.

I know you.

Shivering, she heads back the way she came, to where her vehicle is parked. Near the cemetery’s edge she starts visibly and sways in her tracks: a visitor is blocking the path. Holding her breath, she stares at the dead boy before her, stares through him, and the others, too. Pale children appearing, their bodies ripped, mottled with insect bites, horrifically disfigured. Waiting for her. A gaunt, eyeless teenage girl comes to the front, bled out, clothing soiled, her white lips pressed together and her throat slashed a wicked bright red. A spider races from one eye socket up into her blood-tangled hair. They move nearer. Finally the woman’s breath releases in a rush. “Go. Do not linger here.”

The dead hesitate, hollow gazes flicking warily to the dark manse above.

“I’m on my way,” she continues. “Fast as I can.” They shuffle and draw back, dispersing by degrees. Fading into grayish nothingness. When they are out of sight, she speaks over her shoulder toward Shaw-Meredith House: “And you. I’ll be back for you. Wait.”

She gets into her car and drives south, headlights ablaze, hands flexing on the steering wheel. Jittery. The young woman tries in vain to control them. She has already become sickened, easily fatigued. Yet the earth trembles, and roadkill begins to vibrate on the blacktop as she passes by, begins to convulse and try to rise on twitchy, unsteady legs, as if being drawn upright on invisible pulsating strings in her wake.