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1

Open Season

“Stop me if you’ve heard this one.”

On May 16^th, just after midnight, Jeannie Chan-Montgomery was attacked and murdered on the Cascade Mountain National Park camping grounds, two hours north of Seattle.

On May 15^th at 11:39 PM, Ralph Montgomery, Jeannie’s burden of thirteen years, stood up and started telling “The Joke.” Jeannie hated “The Joke” almost as much as she hated Ralph.

“Blind Guy goes into a bar carrying a huge battle-axe and riding a talking donkey,” Ralph said to the small gathering of friends huddled around a dwindling campfire, wrapped in warm blankets.

Sixteen minutes away from her own butchering, Jeannie jabbed at the orange/red embers of Garret’s fire with a sharp stick, trying to rouse some heat from its depths. Lately, she’d marched through her life beneath the cover of a dark cloud of rage, spinning in orbit about a black sun that burned but shed no warmth. She wished, for the hundredth time that week, that she had something heavy to smash Ralph’s skull with: In Jeannie’s most fevered imaginings, Ralph was the poster boy for Death by blunt-force trauma.

The Montgomerys and three other couples had driven up from northern California the previous Friday night to celebrate Garret and Bonnie Longridge’s twelfth wedding anniversary. The four couples considered themselves close friends; a unit bound by ties that had been formed in college and graduate school. Over the years they’d made it a point to celebrate anniversaries and birthdays together.

Jeannie had hoped to conceive a child the following spring, as she couldn’t quite fathom spending the rest of her life alone with Ralph. The concept of divorcing him, while attractive, made her deeply uneasy. Her mother had raised her with the belief that little Chinese girls who abandoned their husbands were women of low character, a humiliation to their families, and whores.

Half-Chinese, Jeannie thought bitterly. Thanks, mom.

She thrust the stick deeper into the flames.

The three other couples shifted uncomfortably in their blankets while Ralph talked. Jeannie rolled her eyes and gritted her teeth. When he was sober, Ralph was the most boring motherfucker in San Francisco. Get more than two Heinekens inside him, however, and he suddenly became Lenny-fucking-Bruce.

Asshole, Jeannie thought.

She tossed another log onto the fire. Ralph never noticed how obnoxious he got when he was drunk. He never noticed a lot of things, especially where Jeannie was concerned. If he did, he might have noticed the way Garret Longridge studied Jeannie’s every move. He might have noticed the three times Jeannie and Garret had slipped off into the woods together that day, or the high color fading to a rosy glow in her cheeks when they’d returned.

“Bartender goes: ‘Hey, man, you can’t bring that donkey in here!’” Ralph said. “Blind Guy goes: ‘But I’m allergic to dogs, so they gave me this specially-trained seeing-eye donkey—’”

Jeannie’s focus drifted across the campfire to where Garret and Bonnie sat snuggled together in their thick blanket. As Jeannie watched, the very blonde, very W.A.S.P.y Bonnie craned her head back and kissed her husband on the cheek. Garret smiled and kissed her back.

The Happy Fucking Couple, Jeannie thought.

“Bartender goes: ‘Okay, I guess. But the battle-axe has got to go.’ At which point the donkey says…”

Jeannie threw the stick into the fire, stood up and stalked out of the circle of light.

“Honeeeyy,” Ralph moaned in the tone she hated. “You’re killing the joke.”

“You okay, Jeannie?” Bonnie said.

Jeannie stopped, turned back.

“No,” she said. “I’m nauseous and I’m fucking your husband, you stupid bitch.”

A savage pleasure lit Jeannie up from the inside at the sight of their stunned expressions. Her eyes shining, Jeannie spun on her heel and stomped into the woods. She was barely ten yards away from the clearing before she started running.

God, that felt good, she thought. The looks on their faces!

Jeannie ran, loving the wind as it cooled the sweat on her throat, and the rising beat of her heart. She stripped off her sweatshirt and bra, flung them away and ran on, fully aware that she was running away from everything and everyone she’d ever really known.

“Good,” she breathed, and began to sprint.

Someone grabbed her by the shoulder and spun her around. It was Garret.

“Jeannie?” Garret said. “What the Hell—”

Jeannie grabbed him, stifled his outrage with a kiss.

Garret pushed her away. “Stop,” he hissed. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

“I told the truth,” she snapped. “Remember that?”

Garret opened his mouth to answer, but a moment later, something wet splattered Jeannie’s face. She yelped, half-blinded by the sudden warmth that stung her eyes, and realized there was blood in her mouth.

Jeannie opened her eyes.

Something was standing in front of her, something huge.

At first Jeannie thought it was a grizzly bear. There’d been sightings in the park earlier that month. But the thing that gripped the headless body of her lover in one massive fist was too large to be a grizzly bear. With the other hand it lifted Garret’s severed head and swallowed it whole.

Jeannie turned and ran.

Whatever the Not-grizzly was, Jeannie knew, on some instinctual level, that it had come for her. Even now she was too angry to go down without a fight.

Behind her, the Not-grizzly dropped Garret’s corpse and shrieked. Jeannie sensed the creature leap after her, screaming as it closed the distance, and put on a burst of speed. A shadow passed over her head and dropped to the ground in front of her with its arms spread like dark wings.

Jeannie slammed into the thing’s chest and felt her nose break. She rebounded and spun to the ground.

The thing leered down at her, blocking the light from the full moon: Teeth that would have looked more at home in a shark’s maw erupted from its jaws and splattered Jeannie’s face with drool. She screamed. Then the thing sank its claws into the meat of her face and dragged her into the forest.

Jeannie Chan-Montgomery’s shrieks echoed over the forest while her husband and friends searched for her.

Her killer screamed while it fed.

I know these things because Jeannie Chan-Montgomery walked through my bathroom wall an hour ago. I was sitting there, finishing the Times crossword puzzle, when she appeared and called me a “selfish prick.” She’s been dead for nearly six months but that doesn’t matter. She’s glaring at me as I write these words.

“You’re responsible now,” she hisses. And she’s right. In a very real way, I am responsible for Jeannie’s death and the deaths of so many others. They come to me, my Dead, to whisper their stories. I write them down: Like the Dead, I also walk the Revenant Road, and I’m responsible.

I’m responsible.

My name is Obadiah Grudge.

This is a true story.

2

The Good Die Young,

but Critics Live Forever

This is a chronicle that no one will ever believe.

I’m writing it anyway, so that when the monsters come for me, someone, perhaps you, dear reader, will know what really happened. What’s happening even as you read these words.

But first: A little about me.

By day, I’m a writer, the author of several commercially successful “Hardboiled” novels. You may have read my latest, The River’s Edge. Toby Bernardi, the critic for the New York Times called it “unfiltered Crap of the lowest order.” The critic for the Village Voice called it “…the most violent piece of dog shit this reporter has ever been forced to swallow.”

The critic for the African-American simply vomited on his Barnes and Noble receipt and submitted it for publication. I framed that one. It adds a splash of color to the black walls of my Brooklyn apartment.

To date, The River’s Edge has sold two-million copies.

I’m rich, black, thirty-eight years old, six-feet-two inches tall. My build has been described as “gaunt” by my fans. My other job doesn’t allow me the time to cultivate a decent middle-aged spread.

But enough about me.

Let me tell you about a demon I once met.

* * * *

May 13^th, 7:16 PM, Chinatown.

Chen Mao Liu had been in Seattle for six months the night Jeannie Montgomery was murdered. He’d come West from China’s Guangxi Province looking for a better life. He was learning English, and even did a passable Two-Step down at the local Hooters on Wednesday nights.

After working an eighty-hour week at the Golden Fortune restaurant Chen was exhausted. Worse, he was deathly ill: Men like him, illegal aliens without passports or health insurance, typically avoid any encounter with American authority, fearing deportation. That includes hospitals.

The Golden Fortune was humming that night. A steady crowd kept the wait staff jumping. Past the swinging double doors the kitchen was a cacophony of Mandarin, Spanish and English: pick-up orders shouted over a hip-hop remix of Sting’s latest. Another American Date Night in Chinatown.

At 7:16 PM, Chen Mao Liu was hauling a pot of boiling water across the kitchen toward one of the smaller stoves near the alley entrance. Head chef Glen Hong stood waiting at the stove. He was squeezing two live lobsters.

The owner’s brother, a master chef newly arrived from Hong Kong, was working the “Big Stove,” the one normally manned by Hong. Hong had objected strenuously to his boss, a pig-like creature from Taipei named Sammy Chow. Chow had offered Hong two viable options: Acquiescence to the New Order, or unemployment.

“Faster, idiot!” Hong screamed.

Chen moved faster, the boiling water he carried sloshing with each step. A tablespoon-sized dollop lapped over the lip of the big pot and drizzled down the front of his shirt: He barely noticed. His guts were on fire and his brain felt as if someone were dissecting it from the inside.

“Coming,” he said.

Chen reached the small stove and set the big pot down.

“Move out of my way,” Hong snapped. “Stupid asshole.”

Hong tossed the lobsters into the boiling water and slammed the cover down over the pot.

Clang

Chen jumped, startled. He wiped his face with the back of his forearm and bent over to catch his breath. An autopsy might have confirmed that Chen was suffering from dehydration, malnutrition and third-degree burns to his hands and chest.

But Chen’s true affliction lay beyond the scope of any traditional medicine.

“You’re not paid to stand around, fool!” Hong yelled.

To emphasize his point, Hong slapped Chen’s face, once, twice, three times, each slap landing sharply enough to turn heads. Those same heads turned away, pretending not to see.

Dazed, Chen raised his arms to ward off Hong’s attack. He stumbled and his hip struck the big pot and knocked it off the stove. Boiling water splashed over the floor. Busboys jumped to avoid scalding and one of the waitresses yelped as burning drops spackled her bare calves.

“Idiot!” Hong shrieked.

As Chen bent to grab the half-boiled lobsters, Hong hit him again. “You bastards from the Provinces, coming over here,” Hong shouted, his words accented by blows. “Half of you should have drowned…at…sea!”

Finally, Hong relented. Disgusted, he stormed off, berating the staff as he went.

Chen picked up the lobsters and threw them into the pot. Eyewitnesses would later report that he appeared perfectly calm. He told one of the busboys that the pain in his scalded hands helped him ignore the churning in his guts.

The pain forced him to listen to the voice in his head. As Chen went to boil more water, he smiled. He even sang to himself while he worked.

* * * *

10:30 PM.

Glenn Hong and Sammy Chow, the owner of the Golden Fortune, were smoking out back when they noticed the smell.

“What the hell is that?” Sammy sniffed. “Smells like something died back here.”

Hong shrugged. “I don’t smell anything,” he said. “Except for the crap your brother’s taking all over my kitchen.”

“Hey, screw you,” Chow snarled. “Ronnie’s got a right to work as much as you do.”

Hong blew a waft of smoke into Chow’s face.

“Ronnie doesn’t even speak English, you moron.”

“Hey!”

“Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie and Mitsubishi, baby,” Hong said in his best ‘coolie’ accent. “You no speak a’ de Engleesh you no get respect in USA.”

Chow stormed off, swearing all the way back to the kitchen. Hong was a good chef (better, in fact, than Chow’s brother). Chow couldn’t afford to lose the kind of talent he wielded. On the other hand, Hong was an arrogant asshole. Everyone in the restaurant knew of his hatred for his less assimilated countrymen: Glen Hong looked down on men like Chen Mao Liu.

“Idiot,” Hong snarled.

Something in the alley snarled back.

Hong spun toward the sound.

“Hello?” he said. “Who’s there?”

Hong’s eyes strained to pierce the darkness but saw only shadows: No doped-up Mexican drag queen hungry for a fix; no angry black pimp looking to rob him.

He reached into the armpit of his chef’s jacket and yanked his Beretta 92F from its custom-made shoulder holster. It was the same gun Mel Gibson used in the Lethal Weapon movies that Hong adored.

At home, sometimes, Hong practiced his quick draw in front of a full-length mirror, mentally blasting away entire continents filled with ethnic rabble-rousers.

“You fuck wit’ the Hong-dog you gon’ get a face full o’ lead, biaaatch,” Hong drawled. He twirled the Beretta for effect and cursed the fates for making him Asian. He’d often complained to the staff that if he’d been born white or even black he would have been a star by now.

The thing that had been watching him stepped out of the shadows. Hong screamed. The creature growled again: A sound like boulders being ground to powder filled the alley.

Hong managed to get off five shots with the Beretta. Then the thing rushed toward him, one huge hand upraised, claws like black sabers gleaming in the glare from the street lamps.

Hong pissed his pants.

The first swing severed his right arm at the elbow.

The second swing disemboweled him where he stood. The third one knocked him twelve feet through the air. Hong landed in a pile of his own intestines.

The growling thing fell upon Hong’s remains. The alley echoed with its screams of pleasure as it fed.

Two busboys who witnessed the attack would report seeing something inexplicable in the alley that night; a man-like creature, nearly nine feet tall, covered with thick black fur; a monster that glared at them with burning yellow eyes before it disappeared into the shadows. Later, each of the eyewitnesses would suffer the worst nightmares of their lives.

No one in Seattle ever saw Chen Mao Liu alive again.

The creature was reported heading north.

3

Family Matters

1979

My parents were fighters.

My mother, Lenore, was the first African-American model to grace the cover of a Western fashion magazine, British Vogue, back in 1966. Later, she taught school, until the government gutted the carcass of the New York public school system. Lenore fought the school board until she retired and moved to Bronxville, New York.

My father—well, that’s a little more complicated.

They’d been married for fifteen years the day it all came crashing down around us. We were driving back from Martha’s Vineyard after visiting my aunt Selena. My mother’s older sister had married an attorney and moved to the Vineyard from Bronxville five years earlier, a fact that she’d never grown tired of reminding her “little sister.”

I was sitting in the back seat with Doctor Necropolis and Black Murray, the garter snake I’d liberated from my second-grade classroom. Black Murray lived in the glass geranium I kept on the windowsill in my bedroom. I’d taken him along on the trip to Oak Bluffs thinking (inexplicably) that he might enjoy the beach.

My parents had waged a silent war since leaving New York: silent because my mother remained adamant that Aunt Selena never hear her and my father arguing, thereby adding fuel to a fire that was ignited the day my mother was born. As a result, I’d spent the summer of ‘79 ignoring hissed accusations and dodging thinly-veiled glares. I was only 9, but I wasn’t stupid.

Doctor Necropolis giggled: Toil and trouble m’boy, he whispered. Toil and trouble.

Doctor Necropolis was the mortal nemesis of The Time Rangers, a ragtag bunch of time-traveling marionette soldiers who haunted the UHF arm of Chicago’s TV galaxy for nearly a decade. He was the second-hottest seller in the FADCO line of action figures and games from 1967 until 1974, surpassed in popularity only by Captain Radion, the lantern-jawed Commander of the ‘Fighting 509^th.’

He’d made the trip from Chicago, where we’d lived until 1973, to New York, largely because my parents had only allowed me to take one toy with me during a hastily organized move conducted in the dead of night.

The black-clad Doctor Necropolis wielded a ‘Flying Death-ray Lazer Pocket Watch,’ ‘Perfect Karate-chop Action’ and a ‘Time-Grenade’ that could blast his enemies into the distant future or the forgotten past.

My Doctor Necropolis knew when people were going to die.

He’d begun speaking to me sometime after my sixth birthday, an item he’d instructed me never to share with either of my parents.

Newsflash from Futureville, O-dog,” Necropolis chuckled.

My father was fiddling with the radio as we drove along the Merritt Parkway toward New York while Lenore sat staring out of the passenger window, her jaw muscles clenching as she gnawed the bone of her discontent. Finally, the bone broke. Always consistent, Lenore went for the marrow.

“When we left Chicago you promised me that it was over, Marcus.”

Marcus took a deep breath and kept his eyes fixed upon the road.

“They’re breathing down my neck, Lenore,” he said.

Briefly, our eyes met in the rear-view mirror.

“Let’s talk about this later,” he said.

My father took pains never to argue with Lenore in front of me. Sometimes this made him appear weak before the juggernaut that was (and is) my mother: Lenore suffered from no such compunction.

“I don’t care,” she hissed. “I don’t care if he knows. You spend more time with Kowalski than you do with him anyway, so don’t pretend that you care.”

“Lenore, when Kowalski calls…”

“You jump,” she said savagely. “You jump up and run to him like his little black lapdog every time.”

When angered, Marcus could bellow like a general commanding troops under heavy fire. Marcus worked nights. A lot of nights. Often, I’d heard them arguing when they thought I was at school. I’d sit on the front porch until the screaming stopped, too angry to open the door and scream at them to shut up shut up just shut…up.

But the finality I heard in my father’s voice that afternoon scared me more than the loudest shout.

Party’s over, O-dog, Doctor Necropolis whispered.

“You have no idea what’s happening out there, Lenore,” Marcus said, “and I’m tired of explaining it to you.”

My mother actually gasped. She was (and is) a woman unaccustomed to being thwarted.

“You arrogant son-of-a bitch,” she snarled. “Don’t you dare talk down to me.”

“Dad?” I interrupted.

Marcus looked up at me in the rear-view mirror again.

“Quiet, son,” he said.

I returned his smile. They were rare and I wanted to make this one last.

May 19th, O-dog, Doctor Necropolis whispered. Wanna know what year?

Shut up, you bastard, I thought.

Part of me hoped that I was crazy; that a twelve-dollar bundle of balsa wood and string couldn’t really predict when a man would die.

The problem was that four months earlier, Necropolis had predicted the death of Tubby the Wonder Cat, my Aunt Selena’s Siamese surrogate child. He’d correctly forecast the fatal heart attack of our next-door neighbor, Mr. Grant, as well as the abduction and murder of my kindergarten-teacher Mrs. Reagan.

The problem was that Doctor Necropolis was never wrong.

Marcus and Lenore loved each other, for the most part, but some unuttered resentment clouded the air between them. For my whole life we’d lived under that cloud the way prairie dogs live beneath the shadow of a circling hawk. We completed the drive back to New York shrouded in the kind of silence you find at the better funerals.

Marcus moved out the next day.

4

An Affair to Dismember

Criswell Nature Preserve, Northwestern Seattle.

At 10:38 PM, two nights after Jeannie Montgomery was killed, a black Suburban sat parked on the edge of a clearing two miles south of the abandoned guard gates. The park rangers had received a call concerning an injured bear cub that had been sighted on the other side of the park.

Neville Kowalski, the man who made the call about the bear cub, opened the passenger door of the black SUV and stepped out into the clearing. In the circle of illumination thrown by the SUV’s headlights, another man knelt in a patch of red grass.

“That her?” Kowalski said.

His partner didn’t answer.

“Grudge?”

Marcus Grudge stood and nodded, “Some of her.”

As Kowalski ambled toward the clearing he stubbed his toe on a log half-hidden in the soil.

“Son of a… Fuck!” Kowalski hissed.

Grudge frowned. “You kiss your mother with that mouth?”

Kowalski shrugged. “Every chance I get, brother.”

The two men stared down at the gutted corpse at their feet. Kowalski glanced up at Grudge. The big black man was glaring at the Montgomery girl as if he could reanimate her by the force of his will.

“Something’s not right,” he said.

“I know,” Kowalski said. “Two o’ those goddamn chimichangas at Taco Mundo and I got the worst gas leak since the Exxon Valdez.”

“I’m serious, Nev,” Grudge said. “Something’s hinky.”

Kowalski looked around the clearing.

“Whadda ya got?”

Grudge shook his head, “Not sure.”

Kowalski knelt to study Jeannie Montgomery’s remains.

“Nosferatu?” he said.

“No,” Grudge grunted. “Too messy. Whatever ate this poor gal was also a mutilator. ‘Suckers don’t waste blood.”

Kowalski scratched the three-day growth of graying beard stubble that clung to his cheeks. “Wolf?”

“Hasn’t been a skinwalker in the States in five years,” Grudge said. “But this thing, whatever it is… it feels a little like a Wolf.”

Grudge shook his head, his brow furled in concentration. “Something like it anyway.”

Kowalski belched and stood up. “We’d better get in the wind,” he said. “Park Ranger’ll be making the rounds any minute.”

“Jesus,” Grudge said. “Can’t you feel it?”

Kowalski stopped. After twenty years on the Road with Marcus Grudge he knew when to stop and pay attention.

“What is it?” he said.

Grudge was silent for nearly a minute. But finally, he opened his eyes. “Nothing,” he shrugged.

He dropped a big gnarled hand on Kowalski’s shoulder and offered a faint smile.

“You alright?” Kowalski said.

Grudge shrugged.

“I miss them, Neville,” he said. “I miss my life.”

Grudge rubbed his eyes with his knuckles and sighed deeply. “I’ve been thinking a lot about them lately. Know what I mean?”

Kowalski nodded. “Well, family ain’t everything it’s cracked up to be.”

The night wind kicked up sharply. A cold draft raised the hackles on the back of Kowalski’s neck.

“You think what we do matters?” Grudge said.

Kowalski shrugged.

“Dunno,” he said. “Freezin’ my ass off though.”

Grudge remained silent.

“Say,” Kowalski snapped. “What the Hell crawled up your skink-hole?”

“Choices,” Grudge said. “I’m just not sure they were the right ones.”

Kowalski scowled. “Somethin’ you ain’t tellin’ me?”

Grudge didn’t answer. He stared at the dead girl lying in the grass. Then he swore and punched Kowalski in the shoulder.

“I guess I’m just getting too old for this sh—”

The howl from beyond the treeline cut him off.

“What the hell was that?” Kowalski said.

Grudge pulled a silver-plated H&K .38 automatic. Kowalski’s Sig Sauer appeared in his right fist as if by sleight of hand. The two men stood back-to-back.

The howl repeated, closer this time.

“Christ,” Kowalski snarled. “What is that?”

“Goddamit, I don’t know.”

“Bullshit,” Kowalski said. “You holdin’ silver?”

“It’s not a Wolf,” Grudge hissed. “Look, over there.”

Kowalski looked toward the edge of the clearing.

Something was watching them. A dark shape, partially hidden, high up in the trees. The thing glared at them, a sick amber light flickering in its eyes.

“Holy Mary Mother of God,” Grudge hissed.

The hunters lifted their guns, too late, as the shadow thing screamed and leapt at them.

It was Marcus Grudge’s sixty-fourth birthday.

May 19^th.

5

Skirmish

Television sucks.

And let’s face it, dear reader, before you get the idea that I’m one of those idiots who try to convince everyone that film is the last, great, modern art form, movies suck too: How many Nicholas Cage pictures can civilization take?

Television and movies, however, are the best things to happen to writers like me since the printing press.

“We’re back in one minute, Connie.”

Two months after the Montgomery murders, I was sitting in a television studio with Connie Sawyer, literary critic and host of The Eighth Hour, the hottest primetime arts and culture magazine in the public television universe.

The blonde, tall, icily attractive Sawyer ratcheted her black leather chair up just enough to allow her to look down on me. I didn’t mind: The sales from The River’s Edge would shore up my ego.

“You’re much better looking than that God-awful photo your publicist sent,” she said. “Too bad you write such crap.”

“You’re not so bad yourself,” I replied. “For a sour old hooker doomed to belittle those more talented than herself.”

Sawyer’s smile vanished. She’d likened my first book to “…a vile descent into a world too banal to be horrified by its own senseless violence,” and “…a relentless dry hump.” It was a testament to the persuasive powers of my publicist that I had agreed to appear on Sawyer’s show. The last thing I wanted to do was help her: I wanted to drop kick her down an abandoned well.

The assistant director stepped in and waved his fingers in my direction. “Five seconds,” he said. Sawyer glared at me, her perfect teeth clenched.

“Smile, asshole,” she snarled. “This sour old hooker’s about to make you a lot of money.”

“Four. Three. Two. One…”

Red lights ignited and Sawyer smiled for the cameras.

“We’re back with author Obadiah Grudge, whose new book, The River’s Edge, has graced the New York Times Best-Seller list for four weeks in a row.”

“Five, Connie,” I injected.

Sawyer’s smile cracked. Not a mortal rupture (She was far too frigid for that), merely a minor stress fracture, but it made my night.

“Obadiah, your books have been called “dark,” “menacing” and “ominous,” she continued smoothly. “What is it about the shadowy element of society that attracts your focus as an aspiring writer?”

Bitch

“I don’t think of my characters as menacing, Connie,” I said. “Some of them are as familiar to me as members of my own family.”

Sawyer laughed.

“Scary family,” she said.

I smiled and counted royalty checks in my head.

“Let’s talk about The River’s Edge, the story of a little girl who is abducted by her father and taken on a gruesome cross-country odyssey. Were you inspired by real events?”

“Connie, I think all ideas spring from experience. Stories are like doorways into the human psyche. Sometimes they lead to something productive and entertaining, like The River’s Edge, sometimes they lead to the unknown; unexplored rooms in the mansions of the mind.”

Sawyer smirked.

“You must spend a lot of time in dark rooms.”

“I’d like to drag you into one sometime, Connie.”

We chuckled invisible daggers at each other. Off camera, the assistant-director cleared his throat.

“The best thing about those doors, Connie, seriously, is that you never know where they’ll take you. Some people find that scary. I take comfort in it.”

“Some might call that that cold comfort,” Sawyer said.

I made a mental note to call her for a date.

“Sometimes that’s the only comfort we get, Connie.”

* * * *

My assistant, Carla, was waiting in the limo.

“Yo, your publicist booked you on JUNO for next week,” Carla droned. “Oh, and your mother called. She said it was like, very important.”

Carla Quintana might have been the cloned lesbian love-child of Jennifer Lopez and Fran Drescher. A proud “New Yorican,” Carla was sexy in the way that all girls from the Bronx are sexy. She was compact, with the body of a hip-hop video dancer and the mouth of a Mexican longshoreman.

“Call my mother,” I said. “Tell her I’m in the hospital: Minor stroke, some edema. Nothing serious, but no visitors.”

Carla wearily punched in the number.

“You are going straight to Hell,” she said.

The limo driver chose that moment to speak.

“Mr. Grudge, I just want to tell you that I loved Death and the Sorcerer.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“It’s my favorite book.”

“Thank you so much.”

The driver brightened, encouraged. His attention shifted from the road to the rear view mirror, seeking mine, searching for the click. I reached into the mini-bar and grabbed a tiny bottle of Jack Daniels while he rattled on.

“I love the hardboiled private-eye stuff,” he said. “You do it better than a lot of these guys.”

“Cheers,” I said, lifting the bottle, steeling myself.

“You know, I write a little,” the driver said. “Mostly…”

“Mostly Fantasy stuff,” I cut in. “Maybe a little Horror thrown in for good measure, right?”

“That’s amazing,” the driver said. “See? I knew you and me was from the same tribe. How’d you know?”

I shrugged and drained the too-small bottle in one gulp. It was an ordeal I’d endured at least twice daily since the publication of my first novel, Death and the Sorceror: fervent slobberings from semi-sentient tassels of the literary lunatic fringe that is Horror/Fantasy fiction today, a fringe that I despised.

Let me explain: I hate Horror.

Any form of “literature” that smacks of the supernatural makes my ass bone throb with disgust. I write mysteries, “Hardboiled” suspense stories. Violent? Yes. Dark? Certainly, but my novels are grounded in real-world horrors: serial killers, mad gunmen, and drunken detectives at the end of the line.

But for reasons unfathomed by me at that time, my work had always appealed to the Horror geeks. This had proven to be a distinct handicap in an industry that sells thousands of Horror titles each year while ghettoizing even its most successful adherents, saddling them with the literary equivalent of a scarlet letter: the title of Horror Writer.

No horror writer whose name doesn’t begin and end with ‘Stephen King’ is ever considered a real writer. They are laughed at, ridiculed and discounted by the publishing industry, the literary establishment and the public.

“Call me a snob,” I said to the hopeful driver. “But I’d rather let a one-eyed baboon shave my balls with a rusty hacksaw than waste my time writing such inane bullshit.”

To my savage satisfaction, the driver’s hopeful expression died. He pushed a button on the steering wheel and raised the privacy screen between us without another word.

“It’s your mother,” Carla said.

I shot her a look full of the promise of murder.

She handed me the phone and looked out the window.

“Yeah, mother. What’s up?”

Three minutes later, we were heading for my mother’s house in Bronxville.

My hands were shaking. As the car turned around and headed North, toward the suburbs of Westchester County, I willed them to be still. When I looked at my watch the trembling returned, worse than before: Death had come to call on an old family acquaintance.

She was right on schedule.