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  He felt someone touch him, a warm hand slip into his. But he was not afraid. He knew who it was. Looking to his left, he saw Claire standing there next to him. She should’ve been freezing but seemed completely unaffected by the storm. He reached back, cupped the side of her face and drew her to him. As they kissed, his eyes rolled shut and everything was right again.

  But when he opened his eyes, she was gone.

  He was alone. Again.

  Turning back to the outbuilding, he watched and waited. He’d been mistaken. He was not alone. Not at all, as through the growing darkness and violent whirl of snow and ice, they came. From the forest, scurrying up and over the back of the outbuilding, swarming over the roof, scuttling and clicking and falling into the snow like a horde of angry insects, all spindly legs and arms and hideous heads and eyes, they rushed toward him in an impossible wave of madness and evil.

  SIX

  It’s all there. Like a film playing in a theater in the round, the sounds and visions and senses happen all around him, assault him from every side, every angle. Exploding up out of the darkness like pillars of fire, things he cannot understand burst before him, space and time, stars and planets, endless expanses of night mixed with brilliant spires of colors and shapes he could’ve only imagined prior. Helplessly, he waits and watches, his eyes burning as it all detonates and surrounds him, absorbs him until he is no longer a spectator, but a player, one with the universe igniting all around him.

  Tumbling, falling slowly through darkness, he is unable to determine up or down as everything vanishes as quickly as it arrived, stranding him in an endless, starless night. Sucked into a vacuum of black silence, he slowly rotates and spins like an astronaut spiraling through space, his tether broken, alone in an unimaginable expanse of nothingness.

  He thought he knew what it was to be alone, but now understands what it truly means. Hope is an illusion, a memory of something once possible that has been relegated to the realm of myth and broken promises whispered in the dark.

  And just when he’s sure the darkness will swallow him forever, it parts and night becomes day…

  Rain sluices along a window facing the ocean. Sitting before the window is an old woman wrapped in a shawl. She gazes out at the ocean through the rain-blurred window, unaware that he is watching her. Her body is frail and her face is marked with the sorrow of a long and complicated life.

  It isn’t until he looks more closely that he realizes the woman is Emma, the young girl replaced with an impossibly old woman. Gone is the tough-girl act. Her pain is not only real now, it is realized, forged by decades in the fire.

  She does not see him—cannot see him—yet he senses she somehow knows he’s there, even after all these years. Tears of blood spill from her eyes, smearing her ashen skin in swathes of dark crimson.

  * * * *

  Running. He remembered running as hard and fast as he could. But the snow was too deep and thick, too difficult to negotiate, and he quickly became lost in the maelstrom of flakes, disoriented and overcome with horror and confusion. And then he was going down, being pulled down, dragged down into the snow. So cold and sharp, the icy snow scraping at his flesh as countless hands violently grabbed and yanked at him with their hideously inhuman fingers, the wind and a million evil whispers whirling, circling him like a pack of ravenous wolves until he was beneath the snow and all went dark and quiet.

  Just as he was sure he’d died, Lane found himself free of his snowy grave somehow and moving through the front door to the house, Clyde and the others he’d seen earlier ahead of him and moving frantically to get inside as well. Despite his confusion, once inside, Lane closed the door and made sure it was locked behind him. As he stepped through the mudroom and into the kitchen, Clyde and Curly lowered Jed onto one of the chairs.

  “How badly is he hurt?” he asked.

  “Not sure,” Clyde said. Like the other two men, he looked panicked and frozen solid and was still covered in snow, his mustache flecked with ice. “He keeps coming in and out.”

  “You need to get him to a doctor.”

  “There isn’t a doctor within ten miles of here.”

  “Let’s get him in the other room then.”

  Lane led them into the den, where they placed Jed on the couch. Clyde leaned his rifle in the corner but Curly held his tight, gripping it with both hands now that he no longer had charge of Jed. One of his hands was bloodied and wrapped in a black bandana.

  “Is your hand all right?” Lane asked.

  Curly didn’t answer, and as Clyde carefully lay Jed on his back, it became evident that the blood down the front of him was coming from a wound on his forehead, a gash two-to-three inches long. The wound was still bleeding, so Lane hurried to the bathroom and returned with a bottle of peroxide, tape, gauze and a hand towel.

  Clyde took the towel, pressed it against Jed’s forehead and applied pressure. The man jerked forward, as if to sit up, but Clyde gently pushed him back down. “Easy now,” he said. “Got to get this bleeding stopped, OK?”

  Jed’s eyes opened but he didn’t seem completely cognizant of where he was or what was happening. A few seconds later, he again drifted off into unconsciousness.

  “What the hell happened?” Lane asked.

  Curly Briggs, a stout and powerful looking man with broad shoulders, enormous hands, no neck, a perfectly bald dome and decidedly pig-like facial features, shook his head and shuffled away from the couch. He looked to be in shock, or perhaps frightened to the point where he’d begun to shut down as a result. Lane couldn’t be sure which, but either way Curly clearly had no intention of answering him, so when he asked a second time, he addressed the question to Clyde.

  Rather than answer, Clyde shot him a sideways glance then said, “Curly.”

  Lost in a tangle of memories and nightmares, the big man gave no response.

  “Curly!”

  This time he jumped, the spell broken. “Yeah?” he said restlessly.

  “You get over by that front door and keep an eye out, you hear me?”

  With a quick nod he strode back out through the kitchen to the mudroom.

  “Clyde,” Lane pressed, “what is going on?”

  “Where’s that shotgun you bought?”

  “I…” Lane could’ve sworn he’d loaded it and left it against the kitchen table when he’d ventured into the bedroom, but he looked there, it was gone. “I’m not sure, I—I think the bedroom closet.”

  “Go get it and load it.”

  “Look, I need to know what’s happening.”

  “I ever steered you wrong before?”

  “I don’t—what?”

  “Since you’ve known me.” Although Clyde looked terrified, his voice was composed and even, nearly monotone. “Have I ever steered you wrong?”

  “No.”

  “Then trust me when I tell you it’s important for you to listen real good.” He pulled the towel away from Jed’s wound, checked it then put it back and continued the pressure. “Go get the shotgun and load it. Right now.”

  With visions of the strange footprints and the beings surging at him from the woods still in his head, Lane quickly made his way to the bedroom, found the shotgun at the rear of the closet and then the box of shells he’d purchased along with it in a drawer in the kitchen.

  Curly stood by the front door staring out at the storm like a sentry made of stone. “Do you want to tend to that hand?” Lane asked.

  Without turning around, Curly slowly shook his head in the negative.

  Lane returned to the den to find Clyde cleaning Jed’s wound with peroxide. He stood there a moment then sighed, sat in the chair, loaded the shotgun with shaking hands and put the box of shells aside on the table.

  “We were running like madmen through the woods little over a mile from here,” Clyde said, placing a square of gauze on the wound and taping it into place. “There was this low branch hanging down, big bastard, but Jed never saw it. Ran right into it at full speed, went down like he�
��d been shot. Thought it took his goddamn head off.”

  Lane forced a swallow. “Why were you running?”

  The bleeding stopped and the wound dressed, Clyde rose from the couch and ran his hands through his long hair. “I wasn’t totally honest with you before. We didn’t go out to do any hunting, we parked the truck where we always do, followed the same path as usual, but this time we circled around and came up on Dwight Maynard’s property from the back to see what was going on. Bunch of military guys were on the hill with the body, handling all sorts of fancy equipment and wearing Hazmat suits.”

  “Christ, that means there’s hazardous materials or—”

  “We stayed back behind the tree line,” Clyde continued, “but even from there we could see that Dwight’s body didn’t look like before. It was…changing.”

  “Changing how?”

  “Decaying. Fast. We’d all seen the body a couple hours before and in that time Dwight went from looking like he was asleep to looking like he’d been dead and left to the elements for days.” He shook his head, as if he still couldn’t believe it. “They kept waving all these electronic wands and whatnot over him and tinkering with their equipment, but when they started cutting pieces of him off and putting them in little plastic baggies, we got the hell out of there.”

  “How’d you end up here?”

  “We were making our way back when Chester—that’s Curly’s dog, best damn hunting dog I’ve ever seen—started acting strange. Sitting down, not wanting to move at first, and then wanting to run in the other direction. Curly tried to get him to mind, which was never a problem before, but Chester wouldn’t listen. Finally he bit Curly just to get away from him, then turned and ran off. Didn’t make any sense…until we saw them too.” He looked at the floor, obviously disturbed as he relived what he and his friends had been through. “We all saw them at the same time, in a small clearing, about a mile in.” Clyde looked to be slowly fracturing beneath the weight of what he’d witnessed, and was struggling to hang onto whatever scraps of sanity he could. “What I saw, what we saw, ain’t possible. But they were there. Standing there, just…watching us.” He grimaced like he was in pain. “Not men,” he said, whispering now as if the words were too profane to be spoken any louder. He seemed to remember his rifle in the corner just then, and quickly snatched it up. “They weren’t human.”

  Fear rose from Lane’s gut like bile bubbling up into the base of his throat. But even as his brain tried desperately to find an explanation and a way out of this nightmare, he knew Clyde was telling him the truth. “I saw them too.”

  “I know.” Clyde’s bloodshot eyes slowly closed. “And they saw you.”

  Something shifted deep inside Lane. He took a step back and looked to the floor. “Where’s Vince?” he asked. “Where’s my dog, he—”

  Clyde’s eyes opened. Empty sockets, dripping blood black as the night skulking in all around them. “Windows,” he said, voice hollow and unfamiliar.

  The three men—frozen and long-dead cadavers all—sprung into action, firing their weapons at the windows again and again as a wave of the beings attempted to flood through and into the house.

  Moving on pure adrenaline and instinct, Lane racked the shotgun, spun and fired at the closest window, blowing one of the attackers back, out of the window and into the night in a spray of smoke, glass, snow and black blood.

  The guns firing in such a small space were deafening, but they continued, Lane letting loose a primal scream of violence and madness while he racked the shotgun and fired again and again.

  And when it was over, and all that remained were shattered windows, holes in the walls and a storm that was now gradually making its way inside, Lane realized he was standing by himself in the middle of the den, shells at his feet and a smoking shotgun clutched in his trembling hands.

  He dropped the gun, heard it thud as it hit the floor. Then there was only the wind, building and howling and cutting him as bursts of snow blew in through the newly formed portals in the house.

  As if in a trance, Lane walked to the mudroom, took up the ax from the woodbin then went out the front door and into the night, into the storm and into the snow, sinking nearly to his waist as he rounded the side of the house.

  Lay down, Lane…lay down in the snow and sleep.

  “Vince,” he said softly. “Where are you?”

  Everything will be all right if you just lay down in the snow and sleep.

  “If you’ve hurt my dog I’ll kill you. I’ll kill every last one of you.”

  Something brushed his cheek. A tail.

  He blinked. The flakes tickled his eyes. He watched them falling so gracefully, spiraling down from the heavens to cover him there in the drifting snow. Vince was there beside him. He couldn’t quite see him—at least not clearly—but he could feel him. And just beyond where he lay, where he’d been caught and dragged down into the snow, from the very corner of his eye he saw them standing there, little hideous silhouettes in the night, silently watching with their horrible eyes.

  His hand, frozen, split and raw, tightened on the ax handle.

  He was cold…so very cold…and yet…it no longer seemed to matter.

  SEVEN

  Twilight.

  From the heavens, something falls at dusk, descending to Earth. Something ancient. Something…alive.

  When night comes the whispers grow louder, the feelings of unease more intense, sweeping across the open spaces and congested areas alike. Neither small towns nor cities are immune. The oceans and forests, the mountains and open plains, everything and everyone is infected as they slowly sweep across land and sea like dust devils, returned to reclaim what is theirs.

  Not from outside, but from within.

  A feeling…a strange sensation…that odd voice from the very back of your mind that promises despite what you know to be true and possible, this time the nightmare is real. Everything alive knows it, feels it, senses it and understands. Or soon will. Can you hear it? Are you listening? There’s something here with us now, something close and growing stronger. At once alien and horrifically familiar, they listen. Watch. Wait.

  But their time for waiting is over.

  The feeling that a great change is coming, has come, and will soon reveal itself is overwhelming and slowly strangling the young and old, the rich and poor, cutting across every culture, every religion, encompassing every living thing, believer and nonbeliever, human and otherwise. And the future of mankind hangs in the balance like an invisible fog, a dark prophecy spun in the minds of wizards and sorcerers from long-forgotten ages of darkness, disease and death, awakening now to fulfill destinies chiseled in stone before the birth of Man.

  As now it is Man who looks to the skies and watches. And waits.

  Because the age of Man is dying, and with its death a door opens and a new age is ushered in across the globe, a time of something else.

  Something other. Something close.

  The planet is no longer ours.

  It never was.

  * * * *

  Russell Brunel waited for a break in traffic then jogged across the street and joined Claire at a sidewalk café. Sitting alone in a summer dress and sipping a glass of wine, she looked as tired as he was, and despite the fact that it was a beautiful and sunny spring day, a dark cloud hung over them both.

  Claire flashed an obligatory smile and shook Russell’s big paw of a hand.

  He plopped onto a chair across from her and straightened his thinning hair. “Good to see you, Claire.”

  “How’ve you been, Russell?” she asked flatly.

  “Same. You?”

  Her eyes were concealed behind dark sunglasses, but had he been able to see them he’d have known she wasn’t looking at him but rather past him. “It is what it is, as they say.” She shrugged.

  A young waiter appeared and Russell ordered a beer.

  “No news?” he asked a moment later.

  Claire didn’t answer right away. Instead, she sipped
her wine. “I haven’t heard from the police in weeks. I don’t think they’re even still looking. I mean, the way he left your apartment, writing all over the wall like some sort of maniac that he’d been ‘taken.’ They thought he was mentally ill right from the get-go, but even the search for someone suffering from mental illness only lasts so long.”

  Russell fidgeted in his chair. “But there’s been no trace of him and—”

  “There were no signs that he’d been kidnapped,” she reminded him. “The lead detective told me it looked like he just walked out. Nothing was disturbed and they never found anything to indicate there had been any kind of foul play.”

  “Still gives me the creeps thinking about it. Coming home that day and finding the dog there all alone and that word written all over the walls. Jesus.”

  The waiter delivered his beer and moved away.

  “It’s time to come to grips with the fact that Lane’s gone and he may never come back.” Claire sighed heavily then took another sip of wine.

  “He was never the same after what happened in Maine. I knew nothing good would come of that.” He chugged some beer then stifled a belch. “When I went up there I tried to get him to come back with me but he wasn’t having it. Then winter hits and he almost freezes to death out there. People go crazy all the time in places like that. Long winter, all alone but for the dog, cabin fever sets in and who knows what might happen? Guy shoots the house up with a shotgun, goes out into the snow with his dog and lies down. Sound like someone in his right mind to you? Damn miracle those EMTs found him when they did. How he and Vince survived at all is a mystery. You heard the news reports, several locals died in that blizzard, froze to death out hunting or some nonsense.”

  “Lane was a grown man, Russell. He made his choices.”

  Russell looked down into his beer. “I did my best, Claire.”

  “I know you did.”