Chapter One
David Shale pushed a foot toward the ground with an audible gasp. Then he did it again, with the other. "Sheeeit!" he yelled, and stabbed a foot down again, struggling to keep a steady rhythmic drive on the pedals that had been steadily slowing as he and his Triomphe climbed a summit of Crossback Ridge. The trees surrounding the narrow, snakelike road didn''t answer, but a humid breeze slipped across the back of his neck like an intimate breath. When he''d left the sleepy town of Castle Point he''d been a well-oiled engine, feet rising and dipping with the precision of pistons, steadily adding speed and distance to his ride. But now, twenty minutes later, the sweat dripped from his forehead like a bad leak and his legs were on fire with fatigue. You didn''t fast-pump your way across the ridge. At least, normal folk wouldn''t. But David wasn''t interested in normal. David was interested in the Olympic cycling team. And after leading Boston University''s cycling team for two years and then washing out at the Olympic tryouts, David was definitely not interested in a normal training regimen. Training "normal" was cool for college. It didn''t cut it for where he wanted to go.
So this summer, when he''d come to stay with his aunt for break, he''d decided to use her backyard as the course. Nobody biked Crossback Ridge. Hell, most people wouldn''t hike it.
"Fuckin'' shit!" he added for emphasis, and pumped an impossible pedal down toward the potholed and much-patched asphalted surface that this backwoods county called a road.
Something like a tear squeaked out of the corner of his left eye and he pushed his other foot down with a moan. If you''d called it a tear he would have punched now and asked what you meant later. David Shale was no sissy. It was something else that definitely was not a tear. "Fuuuuck!" he screamed in a voice that echoed back across the ridge like a moose call. "Damn, damn, damn," he huffed, slowly picking up speed again.
It was going to be a long summer.
The climb ended without warning. One minute, David was straining to keep the wheels creeping forward, standing hard on the pedals for every inch. The next, and he was above the ridge, high on the plateau, looking out over a drop of hundreds of feet of emerald green. The roadway was cut into a limestone rock face behind him, and at the top, a lone tree hung like a slanting bonsai over the cutback. But as the road continued, it disappeared around the bend of the ridge and down at a breakneck drop. Here, for a few yards, was the only flat surface he''d seen in the past hour.
David stepped off the bike and gently laid it to the gravel. He stepped to the edge of the ridge, and took a deep breath, crouching down to ease the strain in his legs, which currently felt something like unbendable iron rods. The air was clean, rich in the scent of ... life. For miles all around, the landscape was blanketed in trees, riddled with hidden creek beds and broken by clearings full of wildflowers. This was unspoiled wilderness. "God''s country." This is the feeling I''ve missed since I''ve been away from ... Something caught in his throat as his mind choked on the word ... home. He didn''t know where home was anymore, which was why he was spending the summer with his aunt. Since the fire, David had been on his own, always with a roof, but never a home. But still, he''d spent plenty of time visiting these hills over the years, and so in some way, it was a homecoming. Point was, air just didn''t smell like this anywhere else.
As his panting slowed to a semblance of normal respiration, David noticed a small plume of smoke from a spot just a little way down the ridge. He followed it to the ground with his eyes and squinted, then crooked an eyebrow. The smoke was coming from the old Castle House Lodge!
His stomach lurched. What if the place was burning down? Castle House had been closed for most of his life. Even as an outsider who came up here to visit once in a while, he knew the stories. It was the local equivalent of a haunted house-an old mansion from another era, fallen on hard times and long boarded up. Before the depression, the place had been a private resort hotel for the turn-of-the-1900s rich. And unlike a lot of big-money kinds of resorts, the place had survived the ''20s and ''30s and staggered on as a destination for families with names like Rockefeller into the ''50s. But then the whole ridge changed. The rich and famous stopped going to the hill country for vacations, and the minor industry that kept the nearby town of Castle Point afloat found itself trumped by river port towns with cheaper labor and easier transportation. The sleepy little outback got more tired.
Castle House Lodge had closed and the level of clientele that crossed the ridge took a turn for the blue-collar. The lodge had reopened a handful of times to steadily decreasing success, and sometime in the Reagan years there had been the murders there-a grisly, horrible episode-and the place had been boarded up and abandoned for, what the town had assumed was, good. Since then, it had slowly descended into the realm of legend. It didn''t take long before there were ghost stories attached to the place. The cries of disembodied infants echoing out through the windows of the old hotel to carry over the ridge. Spirits glimpsed furtive and faint in the surrounding woods at night, moaning at ethereal pains. Bloody Mary inhabited the top floor. A ghoul dragged the unsuspecting into the catacombs of the cellar.
Kids snuck out here sometimes late at night and dared each other to enter the place, armed with just a flashlight or a candle. Wet crotches frequently ensued when a bat or a night bird exploded from a rafter, its privacy disturbed.
David had kind of grown up with the legends of Castle House. So it was not surprising when he realized that the place was not burning, but in fact was apparently inhabited again, that he stood up from his crouch, put a hand across his brow and said aloud, to no one in particular, "What the fuck?"
He''d been intending to turn around at this point and take the long coast downhill back home as a prize for a hard ride of sticking it out ... but now he picked up his bike and aimed it downhill in the wrong direction ... away from home and toward the entry road to Castle House. He''d come this far, and had to see what was going on down there ... Was someone opening up the hotel again? Who in their right mind would take a plane into Castle Point and then rent a car to cross the ridge just to have a vacation in the hills in this day and age? Spas were a dime a dozen, and most were easier to access.
David shook his head, and kicked off down the hill.
You could see it from the road as you coasted down ... the trees obscured it from some angles, but as the asphalt twisted, you could catch glimpses of the yellowed gables and green shingled cupolas of what had once been a grand castle of a building. As the road curved to turn off into the drive to the old building grounds, David braked and stopped. He stood for a moment, looking down the shadowed roadway. Once it had probably been a stand of proud, sculpted trees guiding travelers to the upscale Gothic-spired mansion at its end. Now it was an overgrown tunnel, branches hanging low across the road to form a seamless canopy over the broken asphalt in between.
David hesitated. You could just barely make out the start of the resort grounds at the end of the dark road. Should he pedal his way in and check it out? It was getting late in the afternoon and it was going to be a long, hard drive back, without a side trip. Did he need to add an extra mile onto his aching thighs'' odometer?
He shrugged and pushed his jeans back to the seat. "No pain, no gain, right?" he mumbled aloud, and kicked the bike into motion again. He was curious.
In the back of his head, he heard the unspoken reply.
Curiosity killed the cat.
Christy Sorensen gunned the engine once more to punch the Olds up the last jog of the hill. She knew the turnoff was just ahead, but the old ''78 was not firing on all cylinders these days. Or something. "Piece of shit," she murmured, and pushed her foot to the floor hard, kicking the back tires out for a second. The resulting swoosh and sway of the back end made her grin.
"Still something to be said for rear-wheel drive," she added. And then swore.
"Fuck me!"
The turnoff to the Castle House was ... NOW.
Christy pulled the steering wheel hard to the left, felt the rear end slide on loose gravel and saw the trees that should have been on the side of the car loom dead in front of her. She corrected and yanked the wheel to the right, pulling the car out of imminent collision with the forest and fishtailing back onto the road to the old lodge. And found a reason to swear yet again.
"Jesus fuckin'' Christ!" she screamed and yanked the wheel back to the left. A biker was pedaling down the center of the road, and her radiator was aimed right at his ass.
The car was still shimmying from her poorly executed turn and Christy couldn''t pull it out in time. The biker looked up at the last second, and she saw his eyes widen as the grill of the Olds kissed the rubber of his rear wheel.
Her heel pushed the brake to the floor and her shoulders screamed as she slammed the wheel to the left, but it wasn''t enough. The bike shuddered and collapsed at the impact and the guy lost his grip on the handles and for a brief, kidney-clenching moment shot sideways through the air. His flight came just in time as the front wheels of the car crunched over the rear wheel and vacated seat of the bike before hitting the ditch to the left and stopping finally, the air echoing with the screech of brakes and rattle and roll of a hubcap that left the car when it left the road, and proceeded to twirl around and around like an old tin cup on the pavement.
Christy looked up and saw the brown of the tree trunks inches away from the car''s front bumper, and took a deep breath.
"Shit, shit, shit," she whispered, and clicked the release on her seat belt. How the hell was she going to report this?
Chapter Two
David heard the roar of an engine just behind and looked up in time to see two headlights bearing down like a death sentence. His surprised eyes caught just a hint of two equally shocked brown eyes behind the windshield, and then he was no longer
sitting on his bike. The green of tree branches and long grass filled his mind and then a smash of dirt filled his mouth as he connected with the ditch and rolled. He felt something hot flash in his back, and then his forehead smacked against something that, had he remained conscious, he would have described as something not unlike the business end of a fraternity brotherhood paddle. You never want to experience the business end of one of those, if someone else is swinging it.
There were white stars.
There were screams. Probably his own.
There was darkness.
And then there was a dull, persistent noise. "Ruuullrriiiite. Shhhhhthshhhht. Rullllrriiitte?" It repeated itself several times before he realized what it really said.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The 13thby John Everson Copyright © 2009 by John Everson. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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