As the body count continues to rise, Catherine walks into one nightmare after another, uncovering a secret plot involving a group of neo-Nazis, top-level federal government, and the strange world of the occult--with global implications.
Before long, Catherine finds herself trapped in a terrifying world that she doesn't understand. And might not escape from."
Carl Miller’s house stood on the hill above the verdant suburbs of Elena. Catherine had followed his car up the winding road past the tall green trees that stood sentry. She’d glimpsed a few homes nestled amongst the trees, before she guided her car under the tall trees that canopied the entry to his driveway.
The driveway curved around to the front of the house, which had a car parked outside it. It was a big country house with a two-car garage attached to it. The garage door had opened and she’d parked her red Tucson alongside his silver Camry. Taking her handbag out of the car, she’d followed Carl into the house and met his wife Julie, who was getting ready to prepare supper. It would be ready in half an hour, Julie had said.
The sun had dipped and it was getting dark outside.
Carl had showed her upstairs to her room, where she’d dumped her bag and taken out her camera. She’d stepped outside into the light evening breeze, and switched over her Summarit-M lenses for her Summilux 1.4 ASPH. The Summarit-M lenses were wonderful—she could shoot for hours in the bright Texas sun without even the slightest hint of flare, but the Summilux was more of a twilight shooters’ lens, and had a magical way of rendering images in a way that was sharp but dreamy at the same time.
Catherine had ambled around the house, taking a few passable shots of the pink and white dogwood trees that dotted the property. It was in the backyard by the swings that she met Libby and Abilene—two painfully pretty little girls aged seven and eight, with long brown hair, blue eyes, pale white skin and fragile physiques that lay somewhere between slender and skeletal. Intrigued by the melancholy cast of their features, she’d asked the girls if she could take their picture, and to work around the low levels of light present, she’d bumped the ISO up to 1250, switched the M8 to black and white mode, and shot them standing embraced in front of the backyard fence.
The end result had too much noise and some strange-looking swirl marks across the frame, but no photo she had ever taken had touched her so deeply.
Maybe it was the fact that the sisters weren’t smiling that lent the image its power.
Maybe it was the way the sisters embraced one another, so they seemed bonded, almost joined at the hip.
Maybe it was the way their physical features augmented the look of childhood innocence.
Maybe it was the way the somber black and white tones looked so anachronistic in a world full of gaudy color.
Maybe it was all of those things.
Maybe it was none of them.
The image possessed a haunting quality that she couldn’t pin down. Her old
photography teacher Mr. Anderson would have been impressed, and would have
praised her for showing an artistic eye. The artistic eye, he told her, was something that couldn’t be taught in a classroom.
As the trees grew black against the sky, Catherine went back inside the house with the girls. She followed them through to the living room and took a seat on the sofa alongside Carl, where she was now. Carl was staring drearily at the TV screen. Some dorky-looking woman in a blazer was grilling a goofy-looking dude on the sofa.
‘You promised me we would go to the cabin this weekend.’ ‘I know, I forgot. I made plans.’
‘Cancel them.’
‘I can’t just cancel them.’
‘If you love me you’ll do it.’
‘And now you’re blackmailing me.’
‘It’s not blackmail. It’s tough love.’
‘Tough love? You’re the one who said I should get some hobbies.’
‘I didn’t say they should involve . . . other people.’
The punch line cued the audience laughter.
Catherine sat watching as some second rate sitcom played out on the television
screen.
Maybe it wasn’t second rate.
Other than the news, she didn’t watch much TV. She wanted to ask Carl if he could switch on the news, but there was a look on his face that said he really didn’t want to watch the news right now.
‘Twenty-two murders across Elena today,’ Carl groaned.
‘Jesus,’ Catherine muttered.
Twenty-two?
She had badly underestimated the severity of the situation. Clearly whatever
was going on in Elena was something far more worrying than she had deduced from his comments back at the house.
Carl reached down his side of the sofa and picked up a pile papers, passing them to her. ‘Those are from the last few days. If you want to catch up on what’s been happening.’
‘Thanks,’ Catherine said, taking the papers.
She placed the papers on her lap and picked the top one up.
Longview News-Journal . . . today’s paper.
ELENA BODY COUNT RISES
‘Nine people were killed in separate homicides Friday, lifting the city’s murder
tally to a total of seventeen homicides in the past three days. Police have said the murders are seemingly unmotivated and uncharacteristic of Elena, a city which in previous years has consistently ranked among the safest cities in Texas according to Location, Inc.
The first homicides to hit the streets of Elena took place Friday morning, when the Elena Police Department received reports of a shooting in the area around Richardson’s General Store, a convenience store located at 2683 Collier Rd, just a ten-minute drive from the city center. When the officers arrived at the convenience store at 9:06am, they secured the scene and learned that the victims, Jared Burant and Sarah Blair, had been transported by private car to Elena Regional Medical Center, department spokesman Nicholas Haines said. Burant, a 26-year-old Collier Rd resident, and Blair, a 45-year-old Collier Rd resident, died from the gunshot wounds shortly afterwards.’
Catherine sat there and quickly turned the pages, a feeling of dread growing in her stomach. A story told of Cara Brucker, a 59-year-old woman, resident of Bryce Street, who was found dead by her husband when he came home from work. She was lying nude on the bathroom floor, with her legs spread apart, in a pool of blood. She had been sexually abused, and her vagina and anus were lacerated. Her breast had been cut off and her body was badly slashed, including deep slashes on her neck, where the jugular was sliced. There were currently no suspects in her murder.
Jim Watermolen, a 63-year-old man, resident of Bryce Way, had been stabbed to death in his bed by his wife of thirty-two years. Neighbors had alerted the police after they found his wife wandering the streets in the early morning, covered in blood that obviously wasn’t hers, babbling in some unknown language. His wife later claimed to have no recollection of the event.
Erin Fenn, a 34-year-old woman, resident of Bonnie View Drive, had been arrested for murder and attempted murder. At about 9pm, she’d broken through the rear window of her neighbor’s house and entered the residence. She’d viciously attacked her neighbors in their living room, killing a 52-year-old woman with a stab wound to her side and injuring her husband, before he managed to restrain her and called the police. She’d yelled and hurled unintelligible epithets at police officers as they dragged her, fighting every step, off to Elena City Lockup. She had been placed in solitary confinement due to her uncontrollable violent behavior and was being given heavy tranquilizing medication.
Lauren Jaeger, a 19-year-old woman, resident of Jessup Court, had been eviscerated in what a police officer described as the most horrific thing he had witnessed in twenty-one years on the job. Hearing her screams, her father had ran upstairs to her bedroom, but it was too late. Her 24-year-old brother had cut her open with a paring knife and was reaching inside her stomach and pulling her intestines out. He had attacked police officers, who then shot and killed him.
The papers were nothing but page after page of the most horrific violence and grisly details that turned her stomach. Catherine wondered if her petty kill would even make it into tomorrow’s paper. It was downright tame compared to some of the other stories. An entire family, the Meyers, had been found slain in their home.
The little girl, just five years old, had been beaten and strangled, her face horribly mutilated.
No witnesses.
No clues.
No motives.
She finished the paper and put it down, a lump gnawing in her throat.
In this tense tale of psychological terror, Vivian Miller (Shelby Young) is a young twenties woman who's serving out her jail sentence at a work release program in the Midwest. Her 90 days of probation takes her to The Cawdor Barn Theatre, a dilapidated summer stock theater run by Lawrence O'Neil (Cary Elwes). Lawrence, a failed Broadway director, is now reduced to staging amateur productions with young parolees and raging over the mistakes from his past. Vivian's arrival in Cawdor starts a terrifying series of events that brings Lawrence's secret past to the present. After Vivian views an old taped stage production of Macbeth, a force of evil is unleashed which soon turns its sights on her. With the help of Roddy (Michael Welch), a local outcast, Vivian sets about trying to discover who the supernatural killer on the tape is before she becomes the next victim.
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