PROLOGUE
Brambletown
The scream woke sixteen-year-old Ida Bramble at midnight, a scream that sent goosebumps skittering up her spine.
The wind beat at the window panes, rattling the glass. Rain drops splattered the surface in patterns that resembled spiders.
She clenched the edges of her comforter and shivered, then froze. Maybe she’d imagined it. Maybe her daddy was right and she was a little touched in the head from the time she fell off Hangman’s Ridge onto the jagged rocks below. He’d warned her not to wander around in the dark. But she thought she’d seen a lost kitty and had run after it.
She remembered the sharp pain stabbing her in the back when she fell. Her leg twisted, a bone poking through the skin.
She hadn’t imagined that. But the body she’d just seen… maybe she had imagined it was a person. Or maybe she’d been dreaming.
After living by the graveyard where her daddy worked digging graves and making pine boxes for the indigents all her life, you’d have thought she would have gotten past the scarydreams, running from the dark shadows, hearing the cries of the dead and seeing ghostly shapes in the night.
But she hadn’t.
Breathing out to control her anxiety, she closed her eyes and listened to the eerie sounds. The wind wheezing, a hollow empty sound filled with sadness and questions about the people buried by their old clapboard house.
But then… another scream pierced the air. This one so shrill she thought her bedroom window might shatter.
A shiver started deep inside her and wouldn’t let go. Her fourteen-year-old cousin Hetty, who’d been living with her and her daddy since her own parents died, rolled over in bed and jerked up, then startled awake. Hetty’s choppy black hair was tangled around her pale face. Her eyes were huge and glassy with fear.
Hetty had heard the scream, too.
Terrified, Ida eased aside the covers and planted her feet on the cold wood floor. Her leg throbbed and her knee buckled. She grabbed the edge of the metal bed to steady herself then rubbed her thigh to ease the kinks as she limped to the window.
The curtain was flapping in the January wind seeping through the cracks, an icy chill sweeping through the already cold room.
Hetty tiptoed up behind her and clenched Ida’s arm. Her whisper came out in a shaky puff. “What was that?”
Ida had a bad feeling she knew. That this wasreal, not a figment of her imagination.
She caught the fluttering curtain with fingers stiff from the cold and held it aside just enough to see out. Hetty stared over her shoulder, her bony body trembling against Ida’s back. The half-moon was barely visible through the winter clouds, leaving the desolate woods and graveyard dark and filled with an ominous sea of shadows.
Ida squinted through the snake-like limbs of the oaks, her stomach churning.
“Oh, God…” Hetty’s voice cracked.
Ida’s fingernails dug into the windowsill as she saw the back of a man in a dark coat and ski cap dragging what looked like a girl’s body toward the deserted section of dead land bordering the graveyard. Land parched and destroyed by a coal mountain fire that had been burning underground for years. Toxins from it had taken lives and driven people away, leaving it looking like a ghost town.
Locals had dubbed it No Man’s Land because neither man nor animal nor plant could survive on it.
Suddenly the figure halted and turned and stared at the house. At the window.
Ida grabbed Hetty’s arm and pulled her down to hide. Had he seen them?
Hetty hunkered into a ball and Ida curved her arms around her as if she could protect her.
She knew who that figure was. So did her cousin.
If they tried to stop him, they’d end up in the ground just like the girl was going to.
ONE
Green Gardens Cemetery
Fifteen years later
