In the epic tradition of Stephen King and Jonathan Maberry, the enthralling third novel in the Haunted Hollow Chronicles finds the town of Ember Hollow in the grip of evil . . . DEMON HARVEST Centuries ago, the first seeds of evil took root in the pastoral farmlands of Ember Hollow. Tonight, the sins of the past bear their unholy fruits—and the souls of the living are ripe for the plucking . . . Ember Hollow was once known as the pumpkin-growing capital of the world. But now, in the wake of two tragic Halloween seasons, the town is more famous for its growing epidemic of madness and murder. Many locals have left. Tourists stay away. But a few brave souls can not escape the town’s unearthly grip: A death-rock band, still reeling from near-disaster. A trio of teens, including the orphaned sister of a mass-murderer. A minister, questioning his faith after a ghastly possession. And the local deputy, who fears he’s turning into something not human . . . From the original sins of the earliest settlers to a newly-infected coven of modern-day witches, the people of Ember Hollow must fight for their lives—and face their darkest demons—or surrender to evil forever . . .
Release date:
September 1, 2020
Publisher:
Lyrical Press
Print pages:
300
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“Such beautiful country,” Maisie commented, smiling over the edge of her half-open window at another of countless farm fields. Most were desolate and weed-pocked. A few, like this one, were dotted with orange spheres. “Forgive me, Ysabella, but I wish you were wrong.”
Ysabella Escher nodded, staring across a similar field from the passenger side of her Mercedes. She had removed her sunglasses and let her window all the way down a few miles back, happy to accept the scents and sounds carried on this October day’s warm wind.
The elder witch clutched her left hand in her right, knowing it was a giveaway. No sense in hiding it. Maisie had surely read her growing unease by now.
Maisie slowed the Mercedes. “Is it…?”
“Getting stronger,” answered her elder. “Worse.”
“I’m turning around.”
“No, Maisie!” Ysabella raised her trembling hand to her neck. “Just stop. Here.”
Maisie pulled off the road, pained to see Ysabella fumbling with the door handle before the car was even fully stopped. Yet, even in physical distress, the sixty-two-year old’s grace was admirable.
Ysabella stepped to the edge of the pumpkin field and dropped to her knees, just as a thick stream of crimson fluid burst from her mouth like a firehose opened full-throttle.
Maisie clamped her mouth to silence a pained gasp as she watched her elder witch jet-vomit across a quintet of pumpkins and surrounding soil. The red fountain flowed in an impossible volume of fluid.
Maisie ran to Ysabella, kneeling beside her teacher, despite her revulsion at the spill. She rubbed the old woman’s shaking shoulders and spoke words of comfort and healing under her breath. At twenty-four, Maisie had already seen a lifetime of strange, wonderful, heartbreaking and terrifying things. But it was never easy to watch her mentor suffer.
A minute later, as Ysabella began to gulp shuddery breaths, Maisie held the petite enchantress tightly to keep her from collapsing. Ysabella allowed her weight to rest in Maisie’s arms. The younger woman stroked the elder’s gray-streaked brown curls out of her pained face.
Hearing a rising hiss, Maisie dared a glance at the jagged line of smoking and charred ground—like a spent gunpowder fuse—rising from Ysabella’s violent regurgitation. The splashed pumpkins lay collapsed, rotted, disintegrating.
It was small comfort for Maisie that it wasn’t actual blood her teacher had spewed, but an etheric by-product of her visions.
The crone took Maisie’s hand. “It’s much worse than I could have foreseen here,” she weakly croaked. “This town. This…evil.”
Maisie traced a sigil of vitality on Ysabella’s back with her finger. “And you won’t let me take you away from here. No matter how I beg.”
“Call…the others,” Ysabella said. “Get them here now.”
“Ysabella, respectfully…we…we’re not complete. We need to make our coven whole before we—”
“No time. It’s too close to Halloween,” said Ysabella, eyes blazing blue with late-day sun and earnest wisdom. “Samhain. If we don’t start now…no number of us will be enough to save this place.”
Chapter 1
American Witch
Ember Hollow settlement
Circa 1670
Hezekiah Hardison smiled at the memory of childish fear that had descended upon him like a vulture the first time he made this nocturnal sojourn back in midsummer.
On this night, the half-moon provided more than enough light for him to traverse the footpath between fields and forest from Conal O’Herlihy’s place on the hill. He could usually count on the company of neighbor Friedrich Schroeder up to this point, but the Dutchman had not attended the meeting.
These late, clandestine gatherings with Conal O’Herlihy and his other followers, coupled with his wariness of these strange lands, had once left Hezekiah a nervous wreck, requiring a jar of dandelion wine and a long smoke of his pipe to calm him enough for sleep. He was glad to say he barely noticed the odd noises and shadows of the forest night any longer.
Until he reached the cornfield, where a mute army of scrawny troops formed across several acres of Schroeder’s land.
It would be shorter to cut through the middle of this field. But Hezekiah was not about to traverse the narrow aisle in the dark between tall, ever-rustling rows whose inhabitants seemed to lean forward and inspect him as he passed.
Worse, neighbor Schroeder had built what he called a bootzaman—a figure made from old clothes dressed on a frame and stuffed with straw and leaves to appear human. Raised on a cross with arms spread like a mocking idol of Christ, it was meant to scare away the ornery crows that brazenly helped themselves to the crop.
Smiling with satisfaction befitting an acclaimed painter, Schroeder had shown the false man to Hezekiah under blazing daylight. It had left him in such a state of unease that he came to dread opening his door after dark, for fear the crow-scarer would be there, issuing its perpetual, silent threat.
Hezekiah knew that Schroeder often moved the man-thing around the field to keep black-feathered thieves on their toes. It was somewhere among the stalks.
Hezekiah did not wish to ever encounter it again, in any light. He hadn’t grown that brave.
However, he had overcome his fear of the odd orange fruit that grew here in the new world this time of year, the one the settlers discovered growing alongside corn and apples when summer began to wane.
Hezekiah had once imagined the huge fruits as monstrous bald demon heads waiting for him to come close so they could rise to the full heights of their misshapen bodies. They would drag him to hell as they mockingly cried out a litany of his frequent impure thoughts for Margaret Worthington, Mary Hodgins, Glory Brightwell, and a good many other of the settlement’s womenfolk.
Now, Hezekiah saw only another harmless crop, no different from the hay and potatoes that filled their barns and barrels as winter threatened. A shortcut over the quiet, musky soil of the pumpkin patch only made good sense.
Peering through the steam of his own breath for the candle lantern he’d left hanging outside his door, still a good two dozen yards away, Hezekiah caught a whoop of surprise in his throat as he tripped on the vine of one of the ubiquitous squashes.
“Damn you!” He kicked the mute obstacle, thinking of Conal O’Herlihy’s fiery rail he had listened to less than an hour ago, against the evil the Irishman was sure had infected the settlement, wickedness that the Lord had shown to the fiery zealot via the fungus, despair that would run rampant and claim them all if not soon addressed.
Looking toward the clearing where his homestead stood, Hezekiah again strained to spot the candle lamp. Since that afternoon, a steady autumn wind had come and gone. But it shouldn’t have been enough to unsettle the lantern hung on a peg outside his door. The beacon was as sturdy as they came, and the candle set within had many hours yet.
No matter. Just past Friedrich Schroeder’s cornfield, his clearing would be unmistakable, even under this weak moon.
The cornstalks rattled against each other in the steady wind, like the dying leaves of poplar trees all around his homestead, or the tail tips of the deadly snakes that had them all wary of where they trod during the hot season.
Hezekiah knew that he and others from the settlement would soon be called upon to help with harvesting the well-bred ears of the field he was passing, though Schroeder himself often mysteriously seemed to fall ill when his time came to reciprocate.
Still, the Dutchman’s special wine was as good as his corn, and often given freely.
Hezekiah wondered why Schroeder had not attended the evening’s meeting. It was the first he had missed, though Schroeder seemed well devoted to O’Herlihy’s cause. Hezekiah already bore a measure of distrust for Schroeder, owing to the Dutchman’s growing love of his own product—the one other than corn, of course.
Surely, with all he stood to lose, Friedrich Schroeder would not betray his friends to—
Hezekiah froze in his tracks.
A strange amber glow appeared, cresting the hill a few yards to his left.
The Devil.
Sinister eyes and mouth burned orange, floating and dancing in the sharp air.
To mock Hezekiah’s secret fears, the Author of Evil had taken the form of a pumpkin.
A low snicker, at once childishly innocent and wickedly ancient, issued from the fire-filled gourd.
Hezekiah felt the urge to run, like the pull of a strong mule, and did not resist it. But no sooner had he pivoted than his feet again tangled in the vines of the new-world fruit—servants, after all, of the encroaching, orange-faced Satan. He pitched forward and fell upon the cold, earthen rooftop of The Devil’s hot home.
With sharp grunts, Hezekiah kicked and scrambled, reaching for the matchlock at his side. But it too was trapped, twisted at an unwieldy angle by his fall. He tried rolling to his side to free the weapon, but the vines twisted tighter. He needed to twist his body the other way.
He did—just as the childish mirth sounded closer.
The burning-eyed demon floated above him, held aloft by something its inner flame—Hezekiah’s own lamp candle—revealed to be far worse.
Schroeder’s scarecrow.
Behind ragged strands of rough fabric, very real eyes and teeth reflected the candlelight. Real, yet only vaguely human.
This was not Lucifer, but Hezekiah prayed it was Schroeder, having a cruel ruse at his expense. He prayed but knew, by the madness those eyes held, that it was not.
“Trrrick!” said the scarecrow in a gleeful voice, as it held high in its right hand the pumpkin it had carved.
“Trrrreat!” it continued, as it raised a shiny hand sickle in its left, the blade stringy with pumpkin innards.
Hezekiah renewed the struggle for his weapon, exposing the side of his neck, the part the scarecrow knew would splash and spray blood so wonderfully.
In his nifty new scarecrow costume, Everett Geelens, many centuries later to be known as the Trick-or-Treat Terror, played with his pretty new toy, sharing it, in his way, with Hezekiah Hardison.
* * * *
Modern day
“When I’m sheriff, I’m gonna get a helicopter for stuff like this,” Yoshida had quipped to Hudson as they set up the hunter’s blind. That was three days ago. It seemed like three years.
The culmination of months of planning, this “stakeout,” for lack of a better word, had the Cronus County Sheriff’s Department’s two ranking officers camped out in what was essentially a treehouse for potentially as long as four days.
It was no pleasure outing. Despite consisting of precious vacation and sick time, this outing was pure duty.
The elevated shelter, which Hudson and Yoshida had started planning and building the previous winter, sat nearly two dozen feet off the forest floor, wedged in the strong fork of a towering elm and hidden from below by strategically placed poplar branches and camouflage netting.
Eight feet square, the wooden box barely accommodated the duo. Food supplies were limited to bland necessities meant to provide energy and limiting waste scent production. Water was consumed sparingly. Latrine buckets were emptied into heavy-duty garbage bags that were hoisted through the roof above the hide and left to hover over them like a disgusting sword of Damocles. A flashlight, wax paper taped over its red lens and pointing straight up, gave a modest hint of illumination in the cramped shack.
Rugged as these conditions were for the deputies, they were mild compared to those suffered by their bait down on the ground, a juvenile fawn. They had placed her in a painless snare just for this purpose, to keep her relatively comfortable while they watched her through the scopes of their tranquilizer rifles, which lay poised in the narrow slot that was the blind’s third opening.
They passed notes using legal pads—they were on their fifth—and traded off watching the bait while the other did push-ups and sit-ups, read or napped. Long before day three, the cramped solitude had begun to wear on them. If the two longtime friends had allowed themselves to speak at this point, they would surely have screamed at each other.
Hudson peered through the night-vision scope of a tranquilizer rifle loaded with high-dosage darts, which he had ordered from a gunsmith in Eagle Ridge. Beside him, Yoshida peered through an identical scope attached to a more traditional hunting gun.
Unlike Hudson’s, his rifle was loaded with silver-tipped bullets, for a worst-case-scenario shot.
They had good reason to remain vigilant. This spot was less than a mile from where the first of many cattle killings had occurred, starting less than a year ago. It had been abandoned by bears and other known predators. This was a sure sign that a more dominant carnivore had taken over the area.
After the events of the previous year’s Devil’s Night, they knew that only one animal could be more dominant than bears and wolves.
Nearing the end of twilight, their inertia was violently shattered when their sights fell on a hulking, dark shape stealthily approaching the fawn.
The shape was familiar. It raised a terrifying memory Hudson and Yoshida had shared with a pair of punk rockers, a memory less than a year old.
Hudson drew the breath that braced his body to take the shot.
The skulking black hulk got set—and made a leap. It covered over twenty feet, landing upon the fawn. Following deftly with the luminous sights, Hudson pulled the trigger; no more than a mute clink.
“You got her!” Yoshida said, breaking the three-day silence. “She’s moving!”
“Keep eyes on her!” Hudson rose and hurried to the trapdoor, clicking on the radio clipped to his belt. “Maybe I won’t have to chase her too—”
“Get away from that hatch!” Yoshida sprang up and aimed his rifle at the square door. The way the weapon shook in his hands, he might have stepped on a live wire. “She’s coming to us!”
Hudson leaped back from the hatch and reached for the knapsack slung across his back. The sound of scattering leaves in the wake of something massive—coming lightning-fast, and snarling with carnivorous rage—sent their adrenaline soaring.
Hudson’s hand went to the silver chain in the sack, found the lock that coupled the links. He pulled the loop taut, as he had practiced hundreds of times.
The hunter’s blind quaked when the bulk of the beast hit the elm. The growing volume of its growl told them the creature was climbing the trunk as deftly as a spider.
The enormous wolf’s head burst through the plywood hatch like a torpedo, sending convulsions of terror through the seasoned deputies. Then the beast was upon Yoshida before he could pull his trigger.
Hudson lunged toward the monster with the chain loop held out—and missed, landing awkwardly across the monster’s sinewy back.
The werewolf sprang to her hinds, sending Hudson face-first to the floor. Seeing stars, he thought for an instant that he was ascending into the night sky.
“The chain!” Yoshida’s cry and the beast’s ear-shattering roar brought him back. “Now!”
Hudson posted his foot to stand—and stepped right through the shattered hatch.
He caught himself on his hands, as he made out, in the dark mass of movement, Yoshida on the creature’s back, pulling the rifle across its throat. He was sure to be tossed off at any second.
Hudson got his footing and launched himself again, aiming the chain loop for the pointed ears that nearly touched the ceiling. This time the hoop found home—only to get stuck halfway down the werewolf’s thick head. Hudson cursed that he had made the loop too small. He had to push hard against the monster’s head to get it over her ears.
Smoke rose where the silver made contact, giving off the sharp stench of burning hair. With a yelp, the wolf sank to all fours, shaking her head violently in an attempt to toss off the burning lariat. Hudson and Yoshida both backed against the walls to get a safe distance from the flailing marauder.
Hudson picked up the flashlight and tore off the wax-paper diffuser, focusing on the monster’s clawed hand. She dropped the trank dart on the floor, looking up at Hudson with glowing eyes that promised annihilation.
Then the eyes softened, and the creature formerly named Aura gave off a keening whine.
“Easy girl,” Hudson said, extending a comforting hand, well clear of her fangs.
* * * *
“Aaaagh!” DeShaun Lott’s cry echoed in the rafters of the Community Center’s basketball court. “I can’t see! I’m…blind!” He fumbled around until his hand fell on his best friend’s face. “Stuart!? Is that you, ol’ buddy?”
“Ha,” answered Stuart Barcroft. “And also…ha.”
DeShaun roughly ran his fingers across Stuart’s mouth. “Yeah, it’s you, all right. Big goofy grin and all. That must be what blinded me.”
Stuart didn’t push his friend’s hand away, just walked away from it to the Community Center’s loading doors, where his brother Dennis’s tricked-out hearse sat with the rear door open. Truth was, Stuart was soaking up every minute he had with his lifelong friend, uncertain how many were left.
He couldn’t resist a barb. “Maybe you can grope your way over to the freeway and stand around over there a bit, if you’re not going to help me with the gear.”
“Nah. You’d miss me, bro.”
Stuart looked back at DeShaun, who smiled as always, but with a hint of sadness. Stuart leaned into the hearse, grabbed the handle of his brother’s coffin-shaped guitar case and pulled it toward him. It was a much easier task now than the last time, some months back, thanks to a growth spurt during the band’s extended hiatus. “Maybe not.”
“Maybe you wouldn’t, what, miss me?”
“Maybe I won’t have to.”
“Don’t talk about it right now, dude.” DeShaun reached in for bassist Pedro’s case. As the teens lugged the instruments toward the center’s stage, the clean purr of an antique Indian motorcycle rose in the parking lot, bringing the goofy grin back to Stuart’s face
DeShaun burst out laughing.
“I can’t help it, man,” Stuart confessed. “Right now, everything is just so…”
“Perfect,” DeShaun finished. “That’s just your meds talking, sonny.”
“Change of plan, losers,” Pedro Fuentes called out as he leaped off the stage, where Dennis—aka Kenny Killmore, vocalist and lead guitarist of Ember Hollow’s resident horror punk band, The Chalk Outlines—and engineer/chemist Bernard Riesling, an odd pairing if ever there was one, intently discussed something undoubtedly so technical in nature that Stuart and DeShaun often commented they should get college credit just for showing up.
“Dennis says we’re setting up dead center of the joint,” Pedro said.
“Dead center, huh?” Stuart repeated. “Bet he really hit the emphasis on ‘dead,’ didn’t he?”
“Says he wants a ‘cavernous’ sound.”
Stuart set his big brother’s guitar case down against the wall, next to a spanking-new portable Yamaha keyboard, and glanced expectantly toward the open door. He should have known better.
Stuart punched him in the shoulder. “Shut it, ass brain.”
“Well, it’s not a big secret there, Stewie,” remarked Outlines drummer “Thrill Kill” Jill Hawkins as she sashayed in, her hair dyed for the first time in months, jet-black this time. She carried a helmet airbrushed with the band’s “voluptuous victim” Chalk Outline logo in one hand and a backpack covered in punk band patches in the other. Red drumsticks jutted through the zipper.
Carrying Jill’s spare helmet, fourteen-year-old Candace followed. “You neeeed me, Stewie?” She set down the helmet and clasped her hands, casting a dreamy smile at him. She fluttered her eyes, swooned and “fainted” dead away on the glossy hardwood floor.
Her big mastiff, Bravo, leaped down from the stage to greet her, tail slashing the air behind him as he made his way to lick and sniff his girl back to giggly life.
Stuart loved this, as he did Candace, as he did this moment, this event. His brother’s band back together—at least for rehearsals—after a painful breakup, his best friend, the girl he loved and her big ol’ dog, all in one place and not terrified for their very lives, for a change.
Dennis came to the microphone at stage front, took one look at Jill and made an expression of lust so intense it resembled pain. “Tell me something, lady. How’m I supposed to get any work done with a smokin’ hot number like you slinkin’ around?”
Jill turned her blackened lips into a sultry smile and gave herself a spank.
Dennis shook his head. “I might have to sit down a lot.”
Pedro and the teens rolled their eyes and groaned.
The troubled, yet loving couple, on advice from Dennis’s rehab counselors, had vowed to remain platonic, purely bandmates, for at least six months or until their new demo album was finished. The sexual tension between them was a tightly wound spring; pent-up energy they did their best to channel into their music.
But the flirtation and innuendo flowed nonstop, to the extreme annoyance of anyone in earshot.
“Thanks for helping, everybody,” Dennis said. “It’s been a rough road.”
Applause, a whistle from DeShaun. Bernard intently straightened cords behind the singer.
“I have to say how prou. . .
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