The Narrows E-Book

Ronald Malfi

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 583

Beschreibung

A creepy and atmospheric slice of small town horror from the Bram Stoker award finalist and bestselling author of Come With Me. Perfect for readers of Christopher Golden and fans of Mike Flanagan. In the aftermath of a terrible storm, the town of Stillwater, Maryland tries to recover what it has lost. From flooded roads and houses to ruined businesses—the residents of the town begin to clean up and return to normal. In the midst of the clean-up, people begin to see things. Matthew Crawly spies his father in the woodlands above the Narrows, but that cannot be possible; Maggie Quedentock nearly hits a child with her car, only to find an empty road lying before her; and in the middle of it all, Sergeant Ben Journell is thrust into an impossible investigation. Animals are being slaughtered, their brains systematically removed from their bodies. Something is happening to the town of Stillwater…something dark and ancient and evil has its grip on everyone. The saying goes, still waters run deep, but no one in Stillwater is prepared for just how deep they run, and no one can possibly be ready for what they might find waiting for them in the dark.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

Cold-Fire Eyes and Shower-Stall Saunas: An Introduction to the Narrows

Author’s Note

Prologue The Boy in the Lot

Part One Stillwater Runs Deep

Chapter One

1

2

3

4

5

Chapter Two

1

2

3

4

5

Chapter Three

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2

3

4

5

Chapter Four

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2

3

4

5

6

7

Chapter Five

1

2

Chapter Six

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2

3

4

5

6

Chapter Seven

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2

3

4

Chapter Eight

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2

3

Chapter Nine

1

2

3

Part Two Sundown

Chapter Ten

1

2

Chapter Eleven

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2

3

4

Chapter Twelve

1

2

3

4

5

Chapter Thirteen

1

2

3

Chapter Fourteen

1

2

3

4

5

6

Chapter Fifteen

1

2

3

4

Chapter Sixteen

1

2

3

Chapter Seventeen

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Chapter Eighteen

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

Chapter Nineteen

1

2

3

4

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6

7

Epilogue

1

2

Acknowledgements

About the Author

PRAISE FOR THE NARROWS

“Malfi constructs a panoramic narrative in which the despair of individuals sharpens the sense of horror overwhelming the town. This smartly written novel succeeds as both an allegory of smalltown life and a tale of visceral horror.” Publishers Weekly

“Well-drawn characters, horrific creatures, gruesome deaths, plenty of blood . . . a soupcon of mystery and an atmosphere of dread that just oozes from the pages.” Dread Central

“You hear a lot of talk about ‘The next big name’ in Horror . . . If there is any justice, Ronald Malfi will be a ‘Big Name’ . . . I’m looking forward to seeing what he has in store for us in the future.” Horror World

PRAISE FOR RONALD MALFI

“Malfi is horror’s Faulkner.” Gabino Iglesias, award-winning author of The Devil Takes You Home

“Malfi is a masterful writer, a storyteller who has no interest in pulling punches or playing nice when it comes to his fiction.” Philip Fracassi, author of Boys in the Valley

“His writing is so strong and so of-the-moment that these horrors and fears tap into horror nostalgia while also feeling brand new. It’s some kind of magic trick, which makes Malfi one hell of a magician.” Christopher Golden, New York Times bestselling author of The House of Last Resort and Road of Bones

ALSO BY RONALD MALFI AND AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

Come with Me

Black Mouth

Ghostwritten

They Lurk

Small Town Horror

ALSO BY RONALD MALFI

Bone White

The Night Parade

Little Girls

December Park

Floating Staircase

Cradle Lake

The Ascent

Snow

Shamrock Alley

Passenger

Via Dolorosa

The Nature of Monsters

The Fall of Never

The Space Between

NOVELLAS

Borealis

The Stranger

The Separation

Skullbelly

After the Fade

The Mourning House

A Shrill Keening

Mr. Cables

COLLECTIONS

We Should Have Left Well Enough Alone: Short Stories

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The Narrows

Paperback edition ISBN: 9781835410530

Broken Binding edition ISBN: 9781835411988

E-book edition ISBN: 9781835410813

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: October 2024

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© Ronald Malfi 2024

Ronald Malfi asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For Don,A great editor and one helluva good guy.

COLD-FIRE EYES AND SHOWER-STALL SAUNAS: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE NARROWS

I want to write a vampire novel, only I don’t want to put any vampires in it.”

This was a statement I made some time in the late spring or early summer of 2011, during a period when Barack Obama was enjoying his first tour of the White House, and I was similarly enjoying a surge of creative profusion that was nearly euphoric. In the span of two years, I had written and published four novels with three different publishing companies—Snow with Leisure Books/Dorchester Publishing, The Ascent and Floating Staircase with Medallion Press, and Cradle Lake as a limited-edition hardcover with Delirium Books (also later published in paperback with Medallion). I believe I first uttered these words over a lunch with a former editor who had taken on a new gig and was looking to bring over some of his old clients.

Because I thought he either hadn’t heard me or hadn’t understood, I repeated the sentiment with a bit more emphasis: “I want to write a vampire novel, only I don’t want to put any vampires in it.”

The editor smiled then languidly shook his head. “Yeah? And how does that work?”

“It could work. Of course it could. What I mean is, I like the tone of a vampire novel, the sensibilities of them. I like the atmosphere, and you know I’m all about atmosphere. I like to get my readers drunk on atmosphere. I just don’t want to write about vampires.”

“Then what will the book be about?”

“Oh, about four hundred pages, give or take.”

“That’s it,” he said. “I’m cutting you off. No more vodka tonics with lunch.”

“Come on, hear me out. What I really want to write about is the death of Small Town U.S.A. presented through the allegory of something . . . horrific . . . that has come to bring about the town’s final death blow. It’s about blue-collar folks and shuttered storefronts and a storm that has come and ravaged all that remains of this town. It’s just teetering there on the brink of existence.”

“Go on,” said the editor.

I didn’t really know where I was going, but I motored on just the same: “But it’s not just about the town, right? It’s about the people in the town, these last vestiges of humanity clinging to whatever is left of the place where they grew up. And the thing, of course, that has come to bring about their demise.”

“And what’s the thing if it’s not a vampire?”

I shrugged then waved the waitress over to order another round of drinks. Once she’d left—and afforded me a sufficient amount of time to formulate a response—I said, “I’ll make up my own thing. Maybe something that, throughout history, people may have mistaken for a vampire. A myth hiding behind the guise of another myth.”

“You shouldn’t have ordered that last round,” my editor friend said.

“What do you mean last round?” I replied, cocking an eyebrow.

*   *   *

I spent the rest of that summer and part of the fall working on the novel that would eventually become The Narrows. I owed much of the storyline to an old manuscript I’d written back in high school, an exercise in juvenilia for sure, but it had good bones, and anyway, the story had never really left the back of my mind after all those years. (Easter egg: that high school version of The Narrows was originally titled Dread’s Hand. It was a title I attempted to use several years later for another book but was summarily—andjustifiably—roadblocked by my editor at the time. In the end, I settled for using Dread’s Hand as the name of the haunted Alaskan town in my 2018 novel Bone White.) I had settled on my cast of characters, I could close my eyes and see the fictional town of Stillwater as if it were a true place, and I even understood the dark thing that had come to my dying little town—a creature whose mission was to siphon the last vestiges of life and humanity from an already dying world. I could see it, even if it continued to try to hide from me whenever I looked.

*   *   *

Warning: you’re about to judge me . . .

*   *   *

The final few chapters of the novel were written in a one-room cabin on the edge of a wildlife refuge somewhere in the wilds of West Virginia. It had been my intention to go out there and garner some peace and quiet to finish the novel, but fate seemed intent on disrupting my plans: the cabin was oddly, bitterly cold for so early in the fall, the food was horrendous, and every night I’d hear all manner of nefarious cryptids muscle their way through the thicket outside my cabin’s solitary window. Moreover, the accommodations were not ideal for writing—there was no desk in the room, only a small round table that wobbled no matter how many coasters from the bar down the street I managed to wedge beneath the table legs, and I was straining my back muscles trying to type on a laptop while propped uncomfortably in bed. So I did the only logical thing: I went into the bathroom, set the laptop on top of the closed toilet lid, cranked the shower to create a sauna-like effect, and finished the novel cross-legged right there on the bathroom floor.

I remember the moment I finished the novel. I stood from the bathroom floor, my legs aching and wobbly, the laptop monitor glistening with a sheen of wetness from the shower-stall sauna. My reflection in the steamy mirror was part Slender Man, part vaporous revenant. There was a beer bottle jeweled with condensation on the toilet tank and empty Slim Jim wrappers lay scattered about the tiled floor like sloughed snakeskin.

I was trembling.

Every novel has weight, and I carry that weight for the duration of the writing process. It falls off my shoulders and drops to the floor, heavy as chainmail, the moment I write that last sentence. Experience has taught me that the weight does not return during the editorial process—there’s a clearheaded athleticism I somehow employ when editing that feels like the polar opposite of the trudging-through-quicksand process of writing.

I moved out of that bathroom, light as a feather, careful not to trip myself up on that chainmail lying in a heap on the bathroom floor. I went to my suitcase and yanked out a set of fresh clothes. I shucked off my damp old clothes and crawled into the new ones. The metaphor of metamorphosis was not lost on me.

It was then that I froze.

A pair of pale blue eyes gleamed luminously from the other side of the cabin window. That corner of the cabin, I knew, was situated on a sloping hillside, which meant that whatever was standing on the other side of that glass in the darkness peering in at me was very, very big.

But this wasn’t a horror novel.

I went to the window, expecting the owner of those cold-fire eyes to flee. But the thing held fast, its gaze laser-focused on me. A few more steps (it was a small cabin) and I was at the window, so close my breath was fogging up the glass.

Those eyes . . .

I reached out and tapped a finger on the windowpane—tinktink tink.

The owner of those eyes cocked its head at such a precise angle that I first jumped backed, then instantly realized they belonged to an owl—a very large owl—a moment before the massive bird took flight, leaving me breathless and admittedly rattled.

I stood there for a moment longer, until a nervous laugh juddered up the vent of my throat. But then I went silent. My body went still. Because the sight of those eyes made me think of something else—something that should be in the newnovel—and I literally walked backward into the bathroom, my gaze still hinged on the window. The shower was still running, the mirror still fogged. I swiped a hand across the moist screen of the laptop as I hunkered back down before it. And as I began to write, I could feel that heavy chainmail crawl up off the bathroom floor, creep up my back, and drape itself once more over my shoulders.

*   *   *

There is no denying that The Narrows was written by an ambitious and somewhat naive author who, to some degree, was still trying to find his footing. It’s clearly one of my more “monstery” novels, though, just as Publishers Weekly had commented upon the book’s release, I think it serves well as an allegory of small-town life in the face of visceral horror. The book was published the following year, in 2012, by a publishing outfit that is now defunct. My editor friend who had purchased the novel read it quickly and had minimal notes. Later, when we discussed the book over the phone, he said, “Well, I guess you pulled it off—a vampire novel with no vampires. But you do realize that people will still think of it as a vampire novel, right? The things in the story are so—”

“Stop,” I told him. “It’s fine. People will think what people will think.”

“People will,” he agreed. And he was right.

The prologue to the novel, titled “The Boy in the Lot,” was released as a free e-book-only download in an attempt to garner interest in the novel prior to its release; that prologue was never actually included in any print edition of the book until now. So here, for the first time, The Narrows is complete.

Stillwater is a small, dying town where a series of terrible things are about to happen. The Narrows have flooded, the people are scared, and something dark and unfathomable has come to roost.

RONALD MALFIJanuary 16, 2024Annapolis, Maryland

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This is the part where I ask forgiveness from all the good folks who reside in the western part of Maryland and along the swollen green range of the Allegheny Mountains; for the purposes of this story, I have taken many liberties with your region, to include its topography, history, and its people, and I know how these things can be sacred to some. For the uninitiated, U.S. Route 40 certainly does exist, as do the specific mountains named within this book. The Narrows and Wills Creek exist, as well. But anyone familiar with the area will know I have taken liberty in altering certain details to better suit this author’s tale.

However, that’s not to say dark things don’t hide in real places . . .

RONALD MALFIApril 11, 2011

“I feel a wonderful peace and rest to-night.It is as if some haunting presence wereremoved from me. Perhaps . . .”

—BRAM STOKER, DRACULA

PROLOGUE

THE BOY IN THE LOT

Eleven-year-old Mark Davis took one look at the rundown motel and thought it perfectly suited his mood. It was a crumbling saltbox against the backdrop of a black hillside forest, the windows bleak, lidded with colorless plastic shades, the entranceway about as welcoming and cheerful as the gates of a cemetery. An uneven slip of potholed blacktop—the motel’s parking lot—stood as a barrier between the ruinous building and the curve of U.S. Route 40.

As Mark’s dad turned the car into the parking lot, the chassis roller-coastering across the irregular blacktop, Mark surveyed the place. Beside him in the backseat, Tim—short for Timbuktu—panted, his hot dog-breath steaming up the car’s windows. Mark petted the old dog and watched as a clear rope of saliva depended from the dog’s mouth and pattered to the car seat.

“Really, Will?” asked Mark’s mother from the passenger seat.

Will Davis pulled the car into a parking space and geared it into Park. “I’m starting to fall asleep at the wheel,” he said. “Unless you want to keep driving, we’re stopping for the night.”

Mark’s mother quickly rolled up her window. “It looks like Armageddon came and went.”

“Quit being so dramatic.”

“We passed a perfectly good Holiday Inn half an hour ago.”

“Forget it. I’m not backtracking. This’ll be fine for the night.” His father turned around in the driver’s seat and smiled wearily at Mark. “This work for you, bud?”

Mark shrugged. Compared to his mood, the motel was a brightly lit amusement park.

“I’ll go in and grab us a room,” his father said, popping open his door. “You guys wait here.”

Tim whined as the door slammed shut. Mark continued petting the old dog. He watched his dad hustle across the poorly lit parking lot until he disappeared beneath the entrance portico. Stenciling on the lighted front window said OFFICE.

“You okay?” his mother asked from up front. Unlike his father, she didn’t turn around and look at him.

“Whatever,” he said.

She sighed. She was normally a pleasant-looking woman, but the stress of the move—and no doubt the stress of dealing with Mark lately—had caused her to look weary and strung-out. “Don’t you think you’ve sulked about this long enough?”

He folded his arms and glanced out the window. Lights were on in some of the rooms, rimming the rectangular shades in milky light. “No,” he said.

“Grandpa Mike was in the military,” she reminded him, “and I had moved five times by the time I was your age.”

Good for you, Mark thought, but didn’t dare say aloud.

“You know,” his mother continued, “your father and I have been talking. Seeing how you’re leaving all your friends behind, we thought it might be okay for you to finally get that cell phone.”

Mark brightened. “Really?” He had been asking for a cell phone for the better part of the past year. All his friends had one, yet his parents had been adamant that an eleven-year-old boy didn’t need to carry around his own personal cell phone.

“Your dad and I will lay down some ground rules,” she said, “but yes, we think that if you can be responsible with it, we’re willing to get it for you. Do you think you can be responsible with it?”

“You bet,” he said.

His mother sighed contentedly in the passenger seat. “Good boy,” she said.

A shape exited the motel’s front office and moved like a shadow across the parking lot. As the shape passed beneath an arc sodium light, Mark saw that it was his father. Will Davis opened the driver’s door and poked his head inside.

“Everybody out!”

“Lovely,” grumbled Mark’s mother.

Mark got out of the car and held the door open for Tim, who bounded out after the boy. The dog went immediately to one of the potholes filled with rain and began lapping up the black water.

Holy crap, a cell phone! Wait till I tell the guys! Of course, this excitement was blanketed by the same black pall that had hung above his head like a thundercloud since he had been told by his parents that they would be moving. His father had gotten a new job in a different state, and that meant leaving all of Mark’s friends behind. A cell phone was a grand thing—it would be his own little slice of independence—but what good was a cell phone if you couldn’t call up your friends and make plans? Sure, he could call them and they could joke over the phone . . . but in the end, he would just have to hang up again and continue being friendless in their new neighborhood.

Timbuktu looked up at him. As was often the case, Mark discerned a deep intelligence in the old dog’s eyes.

“You’re my friend, aren’t you, boy?” he asked the dog, once more stroking the silken gold fur along the dog’s back. “You aren’t going anywhere.”

His father swung a few duffel bags over one shoulder then slammed the car’s trunk. He whistled as he joined Mark’s mother, who looked up at the sagging motel roof and fizzing neon VACANCY sign with barefaced displeasure. “We’re in Room 104,” he said cheerily enough.

Inwardly, Mark groaned. His father was always in a good mood when faced with adversity. He wondered if the man actually relished the little daily confrontations—switching jobs, moving from one city to another, spending the night in some horror movie motel in rural Maryland. Not for the first time, Mark secretly wished his dad would get fired, just like what happened to Davey Hannah’s dad back in Spring Grove, only without ending in his parents getting a divorce, which is what happened to Davey’s parents. Davey was Mark’s best friend back in Spring Grove. They had gone all through grade school together, not to mention the Boy Scouts, and had even been on the same Little League team two years in a row. People even said they looked the same—they were both slender, tow-headed, freckled, cheerful—and once, in third grade, they had told everyone they were twin brothers and had even managed to convince a few of their classmates. Mark figured they would have also convinced their teacher, Mrs. Treble, had she not seen their last names on her class roster.

An eighteen-wheeler, all roaring tires and spaceship headlights, blasted along the curl of highway on the far side of the parking lot. Tim barked at the truck while Mark watched it cruise past, its taillights glowing like demonic eyes before being swallowed up by the darkness.

Mark looped two fingers beneath Tim’s collar. “Come on, boy. Let’s get inside.”

He turned and followed his parents along the motel curb, Tim bounding obediently beside him. He passed lighted windows, their shades drawn, and for seemingly the first time noticed the other cars scattered about the parking lot. It truly was a miserable place; his mother had every right to balk at the accommodations, particularly since they had driven past several nice-looking hotels coming out of the last city. To Mark, this looked like the kind of place bank robbers would hole up.

The room was only slightly better than the outside of the place. Drab walls, worn carpeting the color of sawdust, two twin beds laid out like coffins in the center of the claustrophobic little room. There was a TV atop a nicked and scarred dresser, though it wasn’t even a flat screen. Similarly, the telephone that sat on the nightstand between the two beds looked like something salvaged from an antiques shop.

Tim emitted a high keening—a sentiment Mark could certainly relate to.

So could Mark’s mother, it seemed. She stood with her arms folded while her eyes volleyed from one bed to the other. “They didn’t have anything larger than twin beds?”

“Not if we wanted to all stay in the same room,” said his father, dumping their duffel bags on top of the bed farthest from the door.

“Terrific.” His mother turned and peered at the partially open bathroom door. “I’m afraid to go in there.”

“Cut it out, Sharon, will you?”

Tim padded across the room and settled down on the floor between the two beds. The old retriever rested his muzzle down on his front paws while his eyebrows triggered back and forth, back and forth. Mark smiled warmly at the dog then went to the one duffel bag his father had set on the bed that he knew contained his belongings. He unzipped the bag and pulled out a few comic books, along with a plastic baggie that contained a few of Tim’s favorite dog treats. Mark opened the bag and withdrew one of the treats. It was a greasy brown pipette that reminded him of a Slim Jim, though they tasted—and Mark knew this from experience, having been bested one afternoon by curiosity—like mint.

Tim’s head lifted up off his paws. A beggar’s whine filled the small motel room.

“Come get it,” Mark said, extending the treat toward the dog.

Tim rose, padded over to Mark, sniffed the greasy thin cylinder pinched between Mark’s fingers, then quickly gobbled it up. This made Mark smile, though there was a distant sadness in him now. He recognized that old Timbuktu wasn’t the young pup he’d once been—that there was gray in his muzzle and something called arthritis in his joints, which made him move more slowly and cautiously than he had in his earlier years. There would come a time in the not-too-distant future when Tim would no longer be with him. It would be a separation worse than leaving his friends behind in the old neighborhood, Mark knew. But each time he thought of it, the notion struck him with such grief that he forced the thought away before it could fully form. He didn’t like to think about a world without Timbuktu.

Mark’s mother looked around the bathroom then returned to the room, an unreadable expression on her face. His father was taking off his wristwatch while peering out the singular window that looked out on the parking lot.

“Maybe I should bring the car in closer,” his father muttered, more to himself than to them.

“Maybe you should pull that shade so no one can see in here,” Mark’s mother suggested.

His father pulled the shade down then tossed his wristwatch on the bedspread. He met Mark’s eyes and winked. Despite the cheerfulness of his father’s demeanor, the old guy looked bushed.

“I’m going to attempt to shower,” said his mother, digging some fresh bedclothes and toiletries out of her own duffel bag. “The quicker I get to bed the quicker morning will be here and we can move along.”

Mark saw the tired smile on his father’s face falter, albeit for just a brief moment. When the bathroom door shut, his father sat down on the edge of the bed and kicked off his shoes.

“I’m gonna hibernate tonight, Mark-o,” he said. Then he reclined on the mattress, lacing his hands behind his head.

Tim whined and went to the door.

“I think he’s gotta go out, Dad.”

“We just came in,” his father said, staring at the ceiling.

“I’ll take him.”

“Don’t go far,” said his father.

“I won’t.”

Mark flipped open one of his comic books and found the postcard he’d purchased for seventy-five cents at the last rest stop. The card depicted a grouchy cartoon crab, a pouty frown on its face. The caption read WE’RE ALL A LITTLE CRABBY IN MARYLAND. He promised to send Davey a postcard from the road, and this was the coolest one he could find. A stretch, to be sure, but what could he do about it?

He stuffed the postcard in the back pocket of his jeans then went to the motel room door. He toed Tim aside so he could open the door.

“Be careful,” his father admonished from the bed. He sounded like he was halfway asleep already.

“I will,” Mark said, snatching Tim up by his collar again. “Come, Tim.” He led the dog out onto the curb then shut the motel door behind him. Glancing around, he saw nothing but the parking lot stretched out before him. Beyond that, the little white reflectors along the highway glowed in the moonlight. He looked to the right, where the parking lot concluded in a black plume of foliage, and thought that might be the best bet.

Mark tugged Tim’s collar along the curb toward the trees. Overhead, thunder rumbled, causing him to freeze. Even Tim froze. The air was cool. From his years in the Scouts he’d learned to smell a storm in the air. There was definitely a storm coming. A big one.

“Hurry up,” Mark said, and gently swatted at Tim’s backside.

The dog loped forward then slowed to a concentrative trot. When Tim reached the edge of the curb, he sniffed around while walking in circles, until he hopped down and wended through the underbrush.

Lightning exploded overhead. Mark gasped and looked up in time to see the resonating bluish lights leeching from a bulwark of angry black clouds. The moon looked like a face that was slowly retreating into a darkened room.

“Come on, Tim!” he shouted into the darkness. He waited several seconds but the dog did not reappear from the trees. A scraping sound caught his attention. Mark looked up and saw barren tree branches scudding against the motel roof, blown by the wind.

Stupiddog . . .

He stepped down off the curb and peered through the dark trees. Movement—a whitish blur—caught his eyes.

“Tim!”

But whatever it had been faded back into the darkness. It wasn’t like Tim to be disobedient.

What if it’s not Tim? Mark thought. What if it’s something else?

The thought frightened him. Yet it was stupid. What else could it possibly be? He didn’t believe in monsters. Bears, maybe . . . orwildcats . . . but not some monster . . .

Then Davey Hannah stepped out from behind a large tree. The boy’s pale white face seemed to radiate with an incandescent light. A smile was half-cocked on the boy’s face, his wide black eyes shimmering out at Mark.

It took Mark a second to find his voice. “Davey? Is that . . . is that you?”

Almost imperceptibly, Davey’s head turned first to the right then to the left.

“What are you doing here?” Mark asked.

Davey’s smile widened. He turned and glanced at something behind the tree—the tree from behind which he had come—then looked back at Mark. Yet before Mark could utter another word, Davey stepped back behind the tree, filling his void with absolute darkness.

“Davey, wait,” Mark said, and pushed toward his friend through the thicket. When he reached the tree, he peered behind it . . . but Davey was not there.

Something came up behind him. Something larger than Davey Hannah.

Mark turned around and saw it.

Something flashed over Mark’s eyes. A moment after that, he felt an unforgiving constriction around his chest, cutting off his airway. He tried to scream but couldn’t. When he felt something hot and sharp pierce the flesh at the base of his spine, he tried to thrash and pull himself free, but it was a futile attempt.

“. . . avey . . .”

Mark’s vision faded. He gasped for air but could harness none. His body went numb, numb.

Only a few yards away, Timbuktu barked. Then the old dog turned around and ran off through the woods. A motorist would find the dog hours later, wandering up Route 40 in the direction of a rural little Maryland hamlet called Stillwater.

PART ONE

STILLWATERRUNS DEEP

“We all rose early, and I think that sleepdid much for each and all of us.”

—BRAM STOKER, DRACULA

CHAPTER ONE

1

The students in Miss Sleet’s sixth-grade class were reading quietly to themselves when one of the girls in the back of the room screamed. Heads whirled in the girl’s direction—it was Cynthia Paterson, sitting stiff as a board in her chair, her head craned back on her neck—and there was the sound of pencils rolling to the floor. Matthew Crawly, whose desk was just two up from Cynthia’s, followed Cynthia’s eyes toward the bank of windows that looked out upon the football field, a bright green grid mapped with white spray-painted lines. He could see nothing of significance on the field itself or in the parade of champagne-colored trees that lined Schoolhouse Road beyond the field.

Miss Sleet stood sharply from behind her desk. She was a narrow, hardened woman in her sixties whose body—cloaked in garish floral prints with lace cuffs—looked angular and violent. Her hands were like the claws of a rooster.

“What is—” Miss Sleet began . . . but then the rest of her words were replaced by a guttural groan as her own eyes flitted toward the wall of windows.

Toward the back of the room, a few more students cried out. A good number of the girls had already popped out of their desks and stood like pageant contestants at the back of the classroom, their backs against the filing cabinets and the rank of hooks that held their autumn coats. Cynthia Paterson jumped out of her chair as well, her face suddenly pale, her eyes impossibly wide. Soundlessly, she pointed up at the windows.

Matthew looked again, this time at the windows themselves, streaky with dried soap scum and peppered with Halloween decorations made from brown and orange construction paper. Spotty gray shades made of thick vinyl were rolled into tubes at the tops of the windows, wispy with cobwebs. As he looked, he spotted a furtive movement at the top of the window closest to Miss Sleet’s desk—a twitching, incongruent thing where the shade met the wall. Something small and black hung from the shade. It was no bigger than the sandwiches his mother packed him for lunch, but even from this distance he could see that it was comprised of coarse brownish-black hair and vibrated with life.

“A bat!” one of the boys shouted. “It’s a bat!”

The furry thing stirred and, even over the shouts and whimpers of the students, Matthew heard it emit a high-pitched, tittering sound. Its wings cranked open, its movements as seemingly uncertain as those of a newborn baby. A tiny triangular head capped with pointed ears bobbed as it sniffed the air—up, down, all around. Then it dropped from the shade and, amid a collective cry of fear from the students as well as old Miss Sleet, it zigzagged across the room. Its papery wings flapped frantically.

The students standing at the rear of the room scattered. The sound of their shoes on the linoleum was like an adult’s reprimand to remain quiet: shhh. Some of them made it to the door but, in their panic, they couldn’t seem to get it open. Those still in their seats—Matthew Crawly among them—ducked as the winged critter flitted above their heads. The thing screeched as it drove itself into the chalkboard—Miss Sleet screeched, too—then it cartwheeled up into the ceiling where it beat its wings against the acoustical tiles with a sound disarmingly similar to tree branches whapping against windowpanes in a strong wind.

“Good Lord,” Miss Sleet croaked. When the classroom door was finally wrenched open and a stream of kids spilled out into the hall, Miss Sleet shouted at them not to let the bat out of the classroom. Then she staggered backward into one corner, snatching her purse from her desk and clutching it to her chest like some protective idol.

Matthew got out of his chair and walked across the room toward the windows. His eyes did not leave the frightened creature vibrating against the ceiling. He’d seen plenty of bats before—at dusk, the sky above the Crawly house was alive with them—but he’d never seen one in the daytime. And he’d never seen one so afraid.

Dwight Dandridge, Matthew’s best friend, was one of the students who’d remained in their seats. The larger boy had his head pressed down on the desktop, his meaty arms hugging his body, a look of petrification on his face. Sweat beaded his reddened brow. As Matthew approached, he gave Dwight a wink that Dwight returned, even in his stupefied state, with a crooked grin.

At the front of the room, Miss Sleet inched her way toward the open door. More kids filed out, though a good number of them remained standing in the doorway, too mesmerized by the thing flitting against the ceiling to look away. Someone pointed at it and murmured nonsense.

Matthew went to the center window, peeled away a grinning jack-o’-lantern made of orange construction paper, and undid the latch.

“What are you doing?” Dwight said, craning his head to watch Matthew but apparently too afraid to lift it off his desk. “You gonna jump out?”

“No.” With a grunt, Matthew pushed open the window on squealing hinges.

“Matthew Crawly!” Miss Sleet half barked, half whispered from across the classroom. She was shoving students out the door and into the hallway, her purse still clutched to her chest. Matthew could hear a lot of commotion going on out there in the hall. “Stop that!”

“It’s okay,” Matthew said evenly.

The bat swung around until it nested in a potted plant atop a large metal filing cabinet at the back of the room. Its movements caused the students out in the hall to shriek shrilly and—almosthumorously—caused Miss Sleet to hustle more quickly from the classroom.

“Those things got rabies,” Dwight informed Matthew, still slouched down at his desk.

“Not all of them,” Matthew said . . . though he was a bit discomfited by the bat having appeared now in the middle of the day. Bats were nocturnal. Of course, it was entirely possible that the thing had gotten trapped in the school during the night and had simply been sleeping here, undisturbed, until chubby little Cynthia Paterson had noticed it. It could have been here for weeks, in fact.

Wild and fuming, Mr. Pulaski staggered into the classroom, his janitorial jumpsuit a palette of stains, his wiry, gray hair a frizzy mat on his head. With the eyes of a hawk, he quickly spotted the bat nesting in the potted plant on the filing cabinet. Mr. Pulaski was chewing hungrily on his lower lip and holding a wrench out before him like a fencing sword. Many of the students in Stillwater Elementary were afraid of Mr. Pulaski, and there was no shortage of stories—each one more frightening and implausible than the next—circulating about the creepy old janitor. Once, Matthew had seen the old fellow dump sawdust on a puddle of pinkish vomit in the cafeteria. When Mr. Pulaski had sensed Matthew’s eyes on him, the old janitor had met his gaze—those steel-colored eyes like the burned-out headlights in a Buick—and had held him in it, trancelike. “Might taste a bit different,” Mr. Pulaski had said, his voice like the twisting of old leather, “but it still looks the same.” Then he had winked, sending Matthew scurrying off down the hallway, his skin gone cold.

Now, Mr. Pulaski struck Matthew as oddly comical. Wielding an oversized wrench and peering across the room at the bat with excessive disdain, he suddenly reminded Matthew of Don Quixote, from the book he’d read over summer break: the confused and improbable hero who battled windmills.

“You boys get out of here,” Mr. Pulaski said, referring to Matthew, Dwight, and the smattering of other boys who still lingered in the room, pressed against the tops of their desks.

“Don’t hurt it,” Matthew said.

If Mr. Pulaski had heard him, he made no acknowledgment. Holding the wrench now in both hands, he crept slowly down one aisle of desks toward the filing cabinet, his eyes trained on the small brown husk of vibrating fur clinging to the leaves of the potted plant. Out in the hallway, someone moaned. Matthew thought it was probably Miss Sleet.

A cool breeze whistled through the open window, blowing papers off desks and rustling the Halloween decorations. Tornadoes of dead leaves whirred to life out on the lawn. On top of the filing cabinet, the bat burst from the plant and carved a clumsy arc across the classroom toward the open window. Mr. Pulaski made a pathetic gah sound as he took a swing at the bat with the wrench, and some of the girls out in the hallway cried out in a combination of nervous laughter and abject fear.

“Holy shit,” Dwight squeaked then rolled out of his desk chair onto the floor, covering the back of his head with his hands. The bat swerved toward him, executing a fairly commendable loop-the-loop, then pitched out the open window. A second later, it was gone.

Mr. Pulaski, who was still in the process of gaining his balance by leaning on one of the desks, stared blankly at the window then over at Matthew. Again, Matthew thought of the creepy wink the old janitor had given him that day he saw him cleaning up puke in the cafeteria. Might taste a bit different but it still looks the same. For whatever reason, eleven-year-old Matthew Crawly was stricken at that moment by an unfounded sense of guilt.

Then the bell rang, signaling the end of the school day, and everyone cried out in surprise.

2

It was mid-October, and the western Maryland town of Stillwater was still drying out from a rainy season that had arrived with the swift and unmitigated vengeance of a Greek god, flooding the Narrows and temporarily darkening the town square. Wills Creek—a slate-colored, serpentine ribbon that forged a valley between two tired mountains and ran along Stillwater’s northern border in a semicircular concrete basin, more familiarly known to the locals as the Narrows—had swelled like a cauldron coming to a boil, washing the Highland Street Bridge into the Potomac and casting torrents of black water down the length of the B&O tracks. The town’s roads had served as conduits, flushing gallons of water through the neighborhoods and out to the farm roads, while at the center of town, shop owners had watched with mounting horror as the level of the water had risen incrementally against the brick facades and plate-glass windows of their buildings. Some livestock drowned and automobiles that hadn’t been repositioned to higher ground flooded. If one were to stand on the circular walkway that circumnavigated the top of the abandoned grain silo on Gracie Street, the destruction would have appeared to be of biblical proportions. It took a full week for the water to retreat completely, leaving behind clumps of reeking, muddy sludge clogged with tree limbs and garbage in the streets. Many houses remained dark for several days more, the power having been snuffed out like a candle in a strong wind. The air stank of diesel exhaust from the litany of gas-powered generators that hummed in open yards. Shop owners were left to contend with flooded storefronts and stockrooms, freezers and refrigerators that were nothing more than coffin-shaped boxes in which goods thawed and rotted. The basement of the elementary school that Matthew Crawly attended had filled with several feet of water that had turned black and oily after mixing with the soot and muck from the school’s ancient furnace. Generators were hooked up and a pumping machine was submerged into the swampy mess, trailing a long plastic sleeve up through one of the storm windows, across the playground and the muddied, ruinous baseball diamond, and over the chain-link fence where it vomited fecal-colored water into the woods.

On this rain-swept Friday afternoon, Matthew and Dwight stepped over the train tracks and headed up the slight embankment toward Cemetery Road, their sneakers already blackened with mud. Dwight snapped a branch off a nearby birch tree and began whipping the air. Up ahead, the black iron gates of the Stillwater Cemetery rose up out of the rainy mist like spearheads. As they walked past the gates, Matthew could see the swampy cemetery grounds and the tombstones rising out of shimmering quicksilver puddles. The moss-covered mausoleums beneath the bare limbs of elm trees looked like props in a horror movie. The nearby willow trees hung in wet, loopy garlands, and the sky beyond looked terminally ill. The Crawly house had sustained some damage from the storm, and the electricity had only come back on two nights ago, but that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was the smell—a permeating, moldy stink that, when inhaled, felt like it got caught up in your lungs like lint in a dryer vent. Lately, it seemed like the whole town smelled this way.

“I want to see it,” Dwight said.

“I can’t. I’m not allowed out that far.”

“Says who?”

“Says my mom.”

“Goddamn it, Crawly. Why are you such a chickenshit?”

“I’m not a chickenshit,” Matthew said, shifting his backpack from one shoulder to the other. His sneakers squished in the mud. “What do I want to go all the way out there for, anyway? It’s just a stupid deer.”

“Billy Leary said it looked like some monster tore it to pieces.”

“It’s probably gone by now anyway.”

“Gone where?” Dwight asked, still swinging at the air with the birch branch. “It just got up and walked away?”

Matthew shrugged. He was still thinking about the bat. After the bell had rung and the hallways had flooded with students anxious to begin their weekend, Matthew had gathered his books from his desk, stuffed them in his backpack, and was about to join Dwight out in the hallway when a heavy hand fell on his shoulder. Startled, he had turned around to see Mr. Pulaski towering over him, the oversized wrench still clenched in one thick-knuckled hand. “Shouldn’t be cavalier with bats, son,” Mr. Pulaski had warned him. (While Matthew had not known what the word cavalier meant, the heart of the statement was not lost on him.) “Sometimes they’s dangerous. Sometimes.”

“Man, I just gotta see this thing,” Dwight droned on. “Billy Leary said it might have even been attacked by a bear. Can you believe it?”

No, Matthew couldn’t believe it. Billy Leary was a crusty-faced half-wit who spent most of the school day in the remedial classroom by the gymnasium with four or five other students. Matthew did not put much stock in anything Billy Leary said.

“It probably just got hit by a car crossing Route 40.”

“Either way, let’s go,” Dwight insisted. Frustrated, he snapped the birch branch in half then tossed both pieces over the cemetery fence. “We’ll be home before supper. I promise.”

“Okay. But I want to stop by Hogarth’s first.”

Dwight moaned. Unlike Matthew, whose slight frame and baby-blond hair made him look even younger than he was, Dwight Dandridge was a meaty, solid block of flesh in a striped polo shirt. According to Dwight’s father (who was a drunkard, if the one-sided conversations Matthew had overheard when his mother was on the telephone were at all reliable), his son was rapidly on his way to Gutsville. If that meant Dwight was on his way to becoming fat, Matthew surmised that Mr. Dandridge had been living in Gutsville for most of his adult life and could probably run for mayor.

“Hogarth’s is on the other side of town, dummy,” Dwight groaned. His hands were stuffed into the overly tight pockets of his jeans, and he was kicking rocks as he walked. Matthew glanced at him and found his friend’s profile, with his upturned nose and protruding front teeth, piggish and off-putting.

“I’ll go with you to the Narrows if you come with me to Hogarth’s first,” Matthew said.

“It’s still there, you know,” Dwight assured him. “You don’t have to keep checking up on it. No one’s buying it.”

“Someone might.”

“Everyone else has already got their Halloween costumes picked out, dummy. You’re the only holdout.”

“That’s not true.”

“Of course it’s true. Halloween’s two weeks away. What do you think everyone’s waiting for?”

“So what are you gonna be?”

“A fuckin’ cool space alien.” Dwight licked his lips in his excitement. “I got these big rubbery gloves with claws on the ends and this mask, such a freaky mask. You gotta see it! It’s got this fishy green skin and eyes like swimming goggles.” He was nearly out of breath talking about it.

“Cool,” Matthew said.

“Do you even have enough money to buy it yet?”

“No.”

“Give it up. You should just be a homicidal serial killer,” Dwight suggested. “Wear some ripped-up clothes, put some fake blood all over your face and hands, and walk around with a butcher’s knife. It’s easy.”

“That’s stupid.”

“You’re stupid. Homicidal serial killer’s a fuckin’ awesome idea.”

“Then you can be the stupid serial killer, and I’ll wear your alien mask.”

“No way, dummy.”

They veered off Cemetery Road and headed across town. Even at this hour, the streets were mostly empty, and many of the shops along Hamilton Street, the town’s main thoroughfare, were dark and vacant, their plate-glass windows soaped over and their doors boarded up. Matthew imagined that he heard the autumn wind whistling through the ranks of empty storefronts as if through a system of caves. The arcade was gone now, along with the old pizza joint and the video store. The ice cream parlor where Brandy, Matthew’s sister, had worked two summers ago was gone as well; all that remained of it was a hollowed-out shell on the corner of Hamilton and Rapunzel, like something out of a movie about nuclear warfare.

Those stores that were still open and thriving had their front stoops ornamented with sandbag barricades. Muddy debris cluttered the sidewalk and, every once in a while, the boys had to step over fallen tree limbs rattling their brown, crunchy leaves in the wind. The last time Stillwater had flooded this badly, Matthew was five years old. His father had shored up the foundation of the house with sandbags and moved all his tools and equipment in the garage to the higher shelves. He had plugged up the exhaust pipes of the pickup truck and the old Dodge with tennis balls and wrapped them over with electrical tape. The water came, simmering at first in the street out in front of the Crawly house, the surface alive with dancing raindrops, the water itself oily and black like ink. Soon enough, the Narrows flooded, and a torrent came gushing down the street and across the opposite field. From the living room windows, Matthew and Brandy had watched as the muddy water rose against the framework of the house. Things had been in that water. Brandy had readily pointed them out to him at the time—the bobbing head of a passing snake, the arched and moss-slickened back of an enormous turtle, someone’s cat clinging to an iceberg of Styrofoam. Plastic lawn furniture had washed across their backyard. To this day, Matthew could still recall the loud pop just before the power had blown out.

He wondered now if it flooded like that where his father was . . .

The traffic light at the intersection of Hamilton and Susquehanna—which was the only traffic light in Stillwater, unless you counted the blinking-yellow yield lights where Paxton Street merged with Route 40 on the far side of Haystack Mountain—was dark. Both boys darted across the street to Hogarth’s, the scalloped edging of the drugstore’s green-and-white canvas awning flapping in the wind. There were more sandbags here, along with overturned trash cans and mounds of sodden leaves, glittery and blackish-brown, smashed up against the front of the building. Some of the windows in the nearby shops boasted long spidery cracks, probably from items having been scooped up by the torrent and thrown against the glass. That mildew smell was here, too, just as it was back home, and just as it had been all week at school. It seemed the air was clogged with rot.

Matthew stood before the drugstore’s front window in reverential silence. Dwight came up beside him, their mismatched reflections like two ghosts standing side by side in the smoked glass. Scraps of paper whipped against their shins and a single Styrofoam cup cartwheeled down the sidewalk toward them.

“See?” Dwight said.

Matthew stared longingly at the intricately detailed Dracula mask in the window, complete with realistic hair as dark and smooth as raven feathers. The vampire’s mouth was a ragged, fang-ringed hole from which exclamations of fake blood streamed in perfect ribbons. Its pallid skin looked as colorless as dough, the blackened pits of its eyes seeming to contain infinite space.

“Yeah. It’s still there,” Matthew said.

“I told you it would be.” Dwight sounded bored. “You can probably get it for cheap after Halloween.”

“Yeah,” Matthew said, disappointment evident in his voice. It meant nothing, having the Dracula mask after Halloween. What good would that do him?

“Hey,” said Dwight, suddenly perking up. “You think that was a vampire bat back in Miss Sleet’s classroom?”

“No. It was just a fruit bat or something.”

“A bat that eats fruit?”

“Or maybe it ate bugs.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t know. I just know.”

“Vampires,” Dwight said . . . and the eyes of his ghostly counterpart suddenly lit up in the reflection of the drugstore window. “Maybe that’s what got that hairless boy.”

Matthew said nothing. He didn’t want to think about the hairless boy. In fact, he’d had nightmares about the boy since some kids in school had told him about it.

“How much are you short, anyway?” Dwight asked.

Matthew did the quick math in his head—he had a Superman lunchbox back in his bedroom where he kept his meager savings—and said, “Only about seven dollars.”

“That’s not so bad.”

“My allowance is three bucks a week.”

“Ask for an advance,” Dwight said.

“What’s that?”

“It’s when you get money before you do the work. My dad does it all the time at the shop.”

“That sounds like a rip. Who would do that?”

“I just said my dad does it at work.”

Matthew did not think his mother would give him an advance. Moreover, the fact that getting an advance was something Dwight’s father did confirmed that it sounded like a rip-off. He stared at the mask in the drugstore’s window and thought about how cool it would be to have that mask for Halloween, to wear it with a black cape and the star-shaped pendant he’d already made out of cardboard covered in tinfoil, which was also salted away in his Superman lunchbox.

“Okay,” Dwight said in a huff. “We came and we saw the stupid mask. Can we go down to the Narrows now? You promised.”

The eyeholes in the mask were gaping black pits; the pronged maw of its mouth looked like some sort of trap set deep in the woods to catch bears. Matthew only looked away from it when he felt Dwight tugging at the hem of his shirt.

“Dude,” Dwight moaned, “you promised.”

Matthew sighed. “Okay. Let’s go. But we gotta hurry.”

“Sure.”

They headed back toward Cemetery Road, then crossed into the undisciplined swell of forestry that comprised the foothills of Haystack Mountain. Beyond, the Cumberland landscape, with all its swells and slaloms, looked like there was something enormous just beneath the earth trying to push its way out. In the summer, the trees surrounding the base of the mountain were full and green, obscuring the curving blacktop of Route 40 and the roiling gray water of the Narrows beyond. Now, in autumn, the trees were bare and the curl of asphalt could be glimpsed though the meshwork of ash-colored branches.

Despite his labored respiration, Dwight Dandridge moved quickly ahead of Matthew, crossing through the trees and out onto a plain of sun-bleached reeds like some pioneer straight out of a history textbook. There was a darkened triangle of sweat at the back of Dwight’s striped polo shirt, and Matthew could hear his friend’s wheezing exhalations—heee,heee—as clear as day.

Matthew was still thinking about the Dracula mask as they slowed down to an airy trot at the cusp of Route 40, the winding whip-crack of highway that cut through the mountains. Matthew’s mother didn’t allow him to travel this far from town, and she had on more than one occasion forbidden him from crossing Route 40. Although it was typically within the boy’s nature to adhere to his mother’s mandates, Dwight Dandridge’s influence over him was greater than any other force in his life, as is customarily the way with young boys and their friends. Often, his mother would employ the old adage, suggesting that, if Dwight jumped off the Highland Street Bridge, she had no doubt her easily manipulated yet good-hearted son would readily follow. This comment always reminded Matthew of the time Dwight had tied a bunch of kites to his back, arms, and legs, and contemplated jumping off the highest point of the bridge to see if he could fly. Somehow Matthew had talked him out of it.

“Come on,” Dwight urged, making Matthew aware that he was lagging behind. “Don’t chicken out on me now.”

“I’m not chickening out.”

“Bok bok bok bok bok!”

“Cut it out, jerk.”

Dwight waved a hand at him as he crossed the highway. “Come on!”

After checking for traffic, Matthew crossed the highway toward the steep embankment on the other side that led down into the cold, black waters of the Narrows. Dwight was already peering down the embankment, no doubt assessing the tribulations of traversing the rocky decline down toward the flume of water. White stones burst out of the hillside, looking like the tops of skulls rising from their graves, and Matthew could see tentacular tree limbs and nests of brambles sprouting from the earth, ready to snatch them up and trip them down the side of the mountain and into the Narrows. Some random garbage was strewn about as well, remnants of the storm. People’s lives had been uprooted and swept away, the leftover bits scattered like flotsam and jetsam throughout the wooded mountainside.

Dwight began descending the hillside, pausing halfway down to peer over his shoulder at Matthew, who remained standing at the cusp of the highway. “You coming?”

“This is stupid,” he responded, though he was already testing his footing on one of the large white stones. Slowly he descended the hillside, using the stones when he could to secure his footing; when he couldn’t, he crouched low to the ground, hoping that the muddy earth wouldn’t betray him and send him tumbling down the rest of the way. At one point, startled by the growl of a heavy engine whipping along Route 40 directly above his head, he nearly lost his balance and tumbled down. Dwight, having seemingly materialized beside him like a guardian angel, managed to snag a handful of Matthew’s shirt and prevent the fall.

At the bottom of the valley they crossed over to the concrete lip of the Narrows and peered down. The water level was still very high, the water itself black, swirling, and fast moving. Cattails spun out of rents in the concrete and crickets chirped happily in the tall grass. Dried mud covered everything, further evidence of the flood that had so recently besieged their hometown.

Matthew had heard stories of fishermen pulling three-eyed rockfish from the Narrows, or kids catching uniquely colored frogs with extra appendages. Before his father had left, Matthew had asked him if these stories were true. Hugh Crawly, who had evidently been just months away from leaving his son, daughter, and wife, had told the boy that he couldn’t vouch for the stories of others, but that he had once personally witnessed a two-headed turtle sunning itself on one of the footpaths down by the creek. He’d been with some other friends that afternoon and claimed that one of his buddies had suggested they catch the thing and call the Smithsonian in D.C. Someone else volunteered that they should make soup from it, though the notion of eating a creature as so clearly deformed and unnatural as this one did not sit well with the rest of the men. Finally, in the end, no one wanted to touch it. “It’s because of the old plastics plant,” his father had concluded that afternoon. They had been out by the garage, where his old man had been working on the family pickup truck, wiping down some greasy gadget he’d removed from beneath the pickup’s hood. “Before that plant closed down, people would see all sorts of funny-looking critters down in the Narrows. The water there is still polluted with runoff from the plant. You should never swim there.”