THE
NIGHT
WILL
FIND
US
THE
NIGHT
WILL
FIND
US
a novel
MATTHEW LYONS
Turner Publishing Company
Nashville, Tennessee
www.turnerpublishing.com
The Night Will Find Us
Copyright © 2020 Matthew Lyon. All rights reserved.
This book or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Cover design: Erin Shappell
Book design: Erin Seaward-Hiatt
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Upon Request
9781684425501 Paperback
9781684425518 Hardcover
9781684425518 eBook
Printed in the United States of America
17 18 19 20 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Chelsey
Contents
1692
FRIDAY
1
2
3
4
5
SATURDAY
6
7
8
9
10
SUNDAY
11
12
13
14
15
MONDAY
16
17
18
19
20
APRIL
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I tried to warn you when you were a child
I told you not to get lost in the wild
I sent you omens and all kinds of signs
I taught you melodies, poems, and rhymes
—Lord Huron
1692
She used to watch Simon start fires with the hatchet. He’d had it made special so he could do just that, designed it himself with the blacksmith up in Mount Holly. It was a long, spindly thing with a thread of hard, ash-white flint embedded along the blade’s edge, the wood and metal stained dark with ink or coal ’til the hatchet was so black, it nearly devoured the light. Mary had seen him use it a dozen times or more, catching a flame by striking stone or brick in just the right way, sending a spray of thick white sparks flying out like a fan. Simon had always liked fire, looked at it like he would an old friend. Maybe that should have been her first hint that there was something wrong with him.
Mary ran through the trees, ducking through the shadows and moving as quietly as she could. She tried to keep her breathing under control, tried to keep it from spiraling out into another panicked sobbing fit, but that proved nearly impossible; Simon was burning the trees as he followed her. Overhead, smoke stained the blue sky a muddy gray, filling the air with a sweet, charred smell that slashed at her nose and throat, making it difficult to draw a full breath without shuddering.
She could hear him in the distance, crashing through the branches and singing his hymns at the top of his lungs: “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,”
“All People That on Earth Do Dwell,”
“Now Thank We All Our God.” She could hear the sick smile in his voice, the way his thin lips curled and parted like an open scar with every word. He wasn’t far behind her, closer now than he’d been since she first fled the estate house.
Inside her head, Mary could still hear the sounds of the Ganders family dying—their desperate, gurgling wails and the horrible silences that followed soon after. They were sleeping when he came for them, a grinning scarecrow carrying that goddamned black hatchet, his dark cloak snapping in the wind like torn sackcloth.
She should have known he would follow her. She should have known he’d never stop. He never was any good at knowing when to quit.
Mary ran until her lungs burned, until her legs turned to warm jelly and her vision blurred from the exertion. But even as she flirted with collapse, she kept going. She couldn’t stop now. Not when he was so close behind her.
Dashing through another clearing, she closed her eyes and listened.
These woods made so much noise on their own: the chirping of birds, the rustle of leaves in the wind, the scruff and snarl of nearby animals. But behind all that, Mary could hear … something else. It’d been there since she crossed into the forest, a gentle murmuring sound underneath the chatter of the woods and Simon’s cruel songs, so quiet and subtle that she couldn’t be certain she was hearing it at all. It was like a whispering in the trees, or perhaps beyond the trees—small and sharp, like a silver fishhook pulled through her soul, dragging her ever forward despite the pain and exhaustion, growing louder with every step. It sounded just like her beloved grandmother, gone to the Lord some fifteen years ago.
Mary broke free of the tree line, finding herself at the edge of a great blue lake, the surface of the water still and undisturbed, like glass. In its mirrored face, she could see the sky and trees and thin drifts of smoke, the world reflected. For a moment, she couldn’t help but stare. The lake was beautiful; it was almost perfectly round, as if it were crafted personally by the hand of the Almighty. Some childish part of her desperately wanted to kick at the water, disturb it somehow, make sure it wasn’t as solid as it seemed, but something inside her cautioned against that. No good ever came from disturbing God’s plans.
On the far shore, the trees were thicker, denser, older. More shadow there than light.
Go, the silver voice whispered to her. You can hide there. You’ll be safe.
Behind her, the sound of Simon’s voice swelled, the notes growing richer and rounder. He was gaining on her.
Mary broke into a sprint. Circling around the lake, she picked up speed, less running and more throwing herself along the shore as she made for the shadows. She could make it. She was going to make it.
At the edge of that great darkness, she ducked behind one of the thicker oaks and waited, her heart hammering against her ribs as she struggled to pull more air into her lungs. She peeked out, gazing across the lake to where she’d stood only a few minutes ago, willing him away, praying to God that Simon had taken a different path through the woods. She held her breath and counted, as if getting all the way to ten would be proof enough that she’d finally shaken him free from her trail.
She’d made it all the way to nine when he stepped out of the trees, his heavy black boots sinking into the damp soil at the water’s edge. Except for all the blood, he looked exactly as she remembered him: tall and post-thin with socked-out, dark-ringed eyes and a permanent rictus grin pulling his papery, haggard cheeks in opposite directions.
Mary watched from the shadows as Simon owled his head around, scanning the shore of the lake, his eyes eventually coming to rest on her own. It took everything Mary had inside her to not scream. Damn the shadows, damn the trees—he looked at her as if they weren’t there at all, as if there were nothing in this world except him and her, trapped together in a perfect void.
Grinning so wide it threatened to split his head in half, Simon raised a hand and waved. Standing there, behind the oak, she could almost hear his reedy voice, calling out to her: Miss Kane… Miss Kane, I see you … Then he started to move, strolling purposefully along the lakeshore, lazily striking sparks off the rocks with his hatchet.
Mary watched him for longer than she should have, transfixed by the jerky way he walked, like a marionette guided by an inexpe
rt hand. Then, remembering herself, she turned and ran into the thick of the old forest, following the whispers to wherever they led her.
Eventually she’d find a place to hide.
Eventually she’d reach where she was going.
FRIDAY
1
Chloe hadn’t really known how bad things had gotten until three weeks before the end of the school year, when Parker went and beat the shit out of Kyle Terletsky in the White Castle parking lot.
All their friends were there with them: Adam; Nicky and her new boyfriend, Josh; shit, even Nate was there, though he was too busy looking at porn on his phone to pay attention. They were all sitting together at one of those crappy molded-steel tables when Terletsky and his buddies walked by. As he passed, Kyle leaned in and said something to Parker, though Chloe didn’t hear what. None of them did.
What happened next was so sudden that, for a moment, Chloe didn’t even notice anything had gone wrong. One second, Parker was sitting next to her, eating his way through a small pyramid of sliders; the next, he was dragging Terletsky across the blacktop and putting him in the hospital. None of them could stop him from doing it. Parker had always been a big kid, but he’d seriously taken off over the past year, growing taller and broader until he was roughly the size of a small house.
He didn’t even say anything while he did it; he just tossed Kyle to the ground like a rag doll, then went to work on his skull with his big, milk-jug fists, pounding the kid’s face into chunky tomato soup. Adam, ever the peacemaker, tried to pull Parker off the kid, but football star or not, Adam could only do so much. Parker was so much bigger than him, and by the time Adam closed the distance, it was too late. The damage was done.
When Parker finally let up, Terletsky looked like he’d been hit by a truck, backed over, then hit again.
Before anyone could call the cops, the five of them ushered Parker into Chloe’s mom’s Chevy Astro and got the hell out of there. They rode in silence back to Nicky’s house. Once they were safely there, Chloe asked everyone to give her and Parker—still sitting in the way, way back, nearly vibrating with rage—a minute alone to talk.
When they climbed out to join their friends a few minutes later, Chloe’s face was dark and knotted with worry from the things her cousin had told her through his tears. It wasn’t until Parker had gone home for the night that Nicky and Adam were able to coax the story out of Chloe.
Terletsky had called him orphan.
The story got around school real fast; it even filtered all the way up to the administration. But since the incident in question had occurred off school grounds and nobody—not even the Terletsky kid with his shattered, fucked-up face—was about to snitch, the school officials couldn’t actually do anything about it. Parker was in the clear.
Thing was, Chloe had told her friends only some of what her cousin had confessed to her, sitting in the back of the van. There was so much she’d left out, things she couldn’t wrap her head around, things she wouldn’t have believed Parker could have said had she not been there to hear them. Like how good it felt to beat on Terletsky until he spat blood and went limp. Or the horrible way Park had smiled when he’d told her how Kyle had begged for mercy through broken teeth.
And she didn’t tell them that since Christmas, he’d been carrying his dad’s gun around with him wherever he went.
* * *
By the time the final bell had rung and Chloe reached the parking lot, almost everybody else was already there, impatient to get going. Adam, tall and casually handsome, leaned against the grill of the van, hands in the pockets of his letterman jacket, backpack slung just so over one shoulder—so picture-perfect, Chloe would have thought it was a put-on if she didn’t know him as well as she did. Adam saw Chloe first and raised a hand to wave as she crossed through the parking lot, weaving between cars and crowds of relieved-looking kids, finally free for the summer. Chloe waved back as she got closer, fishing in her backpack for her keys. She clicked the remote once, and the van chirped, the doors unlocking with a satisfying ka-thunk.
Nicky sat in front of Adam on the concrete wheel stop, her shock of bright-red hair tied back into a ponytail that exploded from the back of her head, smoking her menthol cigarettes and holding hands with Josh, who sat faithfully by her side, eyes narrowed under the bill of his ball cap, Instagram feed wheeling by on his phone. Chloe and Parker had known Nicky almost as long as they’d known Adam, the four of them going through school together all the way back from Mrs. Johnson’s second-grade class.
Nicoletta Rosetti—everybody just called her Nicky—was the new kid in school back then, but after being seated together that first day in second grade, the four of them had become inseparable. They just … clicked, in that special way little kids can when they find out they have more in common than they have differences. The things that set them apart from each other just didn’t really matter. They were always different, but they liked that about each other. Chloe had her academics, Adam and Nicky did school sports (football and track, respectively), and Parker was a sensitive kid who liked to just sit and read more than anything else.
It was the four of them from then on, their own little tribe against the rest of the world—or at least the rest of New Jersey. They were together when Adam’s brother went to jail the first time, when Chloe’s parents separated for half of freshman year, when Parker’s dad went missing last October. Even when Nicky and Josh got together, all of them had gone on the first date, a group thing to see some stupid movie.
Nicky and Josh had been dating since just before Valentine’s Day, but even now, at the end of the school year, none of them had stopped calling him her new boyfriend, as if there were any other boyfriends in the past to speak of. Chloe liked Josh, generally speaking. He was nice, a little boring, but he seemed to love Nicky as much as she loved him, which Chloe supposed was really the important part of it.
Over on the sidewalk, Nate was busily upending his backpack into the trash can, shaking papers loose, gleefully muttering “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you” as a whole year’s worth of work spilled messily into the waiting mouth of the green drum. Being built like an oversized potato, he had to stand up on his tiptoes to do it, but he was making it work. They’d all met Nate in eighth grade, when he was assigned to their group in Earth Science. Adam was the first one to suggest they invite him along to hang out that first time, but he fit in with them right away, almost as if he’d been there all along. Nate was a funny kid, and he meant well, even if he didn’t know when to shut up sometimes.
“What took you so long?” Nate asked Chloe without looking up, whipping his backpack from one end like a dusty blanket, making sure it was totally empty. “We’ve been waiting for like an hour.”
“It hasn’t really been an hour,” Josh said offhandedly, eyes still trained firmly to his phone. “It’s been five minutes. Maybe a little bit more.”
“Traitor,” Nate said. Looking satisfied that he’d erased all traces of his junior year of high school, he turned away from the trash can and crossed over to stand by his friends, smiling and wetly smacking his lips against his teeth in the same disgusting way he always did.
“It’s been five minutes,” Adam echoed. “If that. Don’t listen to Nate.”
Chloe cracked a grin. “Why, Mr. Jarvis,” she said. “Have I ever?”
“You can both eat my shit,” Nate said with a chuckle, then nodded at the cigarette Nicky held pinched between her knuckles. “Can I get one of those?”
Nicky shook her head. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s never just one with you,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You’ll smoke half the pack if I’m not careful. You know how long it took me to get these? Scam one off someone else, or find a senior to buy you your own.”
“We are seniors. I mean, we are now.”
“Not senior enough to buy our own smokes.”
“Come on, give one over,” Nate wheedled.
“Sorry,
bud. Nothing doing.”
Nate gave her the finger and looked around at the rest of them. “So are we going to get this show on the road, or what?”
Nicky blew smoke. “Soon as Parker gets here, yeah.”
“Well, shit, where is everybody’s favorite angry boy? Haven’t seen him since free period this morning,” Nate said, looking around. “Chloe? Seen your cousin around today?”
Chloe shook her head and then plucked her phone out of her pocket and thumbed off a quick text to Parker:
Hey, you around? We’re ready to get out of here.
12:15PM, 5/25
“I don’t think he was here today,” Josh said, sounding disinterested. “He’s in Algebra Two with me, and he didn’t show up at all this morning.”
Chloe looked around at her friends. “Anyone else?”
Nicky held her hands up, Newport pursed tightly between red lips. “Not I.”
Adam nodded toward Millbrook Avenue and the Shop-N-Go situated across the street from the school parking lot.
“There he is.”
As if on cue, a giant, hulking shadow stepped through the Shop-N-Go doors, decked out in a red-on-black Slayer T-shirt and a pair of busted jeans, cable-thick arms heavy with a pair of fully loaded plastic bags. A shopworn camping pack was strapped tightly over his shoulders, and his black-rimmed glasses were fixed high on the bridge of his nose. Parker.
Looking at him from here, Chloe couldn’t help but think that of course Terletsky never stood a chance—it was like a field mouse trying to fistfight a freight train. None of them said anything as they watched him cross the street, brow furrowed under his shock of black hair, capping the scowl that never seemed to leave his face anymore.
Parker walked up to them and set the bags down in the middle of the group, then looked around at his friends.
“What are you all staring at?”
“Nothing,” Chloe said, pulling her cousin into a brief hug. “Not a thing. How was your last day of class?”
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