eBook ISBN 9780744309898
Audiobook ISBN 9780744309959
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023950763
Cover and book design by Maryann Appel
Cover artwork by Mordolff
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Chapter One
The room was white—almost blindingly so, with surfaces that had been scrubbed to a shine, so that by staring at the floor or a wall it was nearly possible to see one’s own reflection. It was clean and fresh and sterile. The perfect canvas.
The most beautiful aspect of the white room was how stark contrasting shapes and colors appeared on the initial blankness. This was an aesthetic quality that the man found particularly pleasing to explore, and so he did as such extensively, to a near-compulsive rate. He fancied himself an artist, with the borders of the room providing the ideal location to bring his masterpiece to life.
Keeping that in mind and aiming for the truest form of artistic perfection he could conjure, the man gripped the tool in his hand—his paintbrush of choice—and hefted it before him. His arm dropped in an almost graceful fashion as he completed a full swoop, similar in form to that of a baseball player setting up to bat. Then, pausing once to allow the moment to settle in its resplendent glory, the man slowly lowered his arm, tool in hand, and looked around at what he had created.
The white backdrop truly was perfect, he thought. It made the red look so much fresher—sharper and more potent. And the shapes the droplets formed, the pattern they enacted across the room. Perfect. The man admired the final product and couldn’t help but think that this may have been some of his finest work yet.
Not to mention the added pleasure derived from the screaming.
While some find the sound of a human scream to be unpleasant, the man found it to be more precious than music—a chorus of varying pitches and volumes coming together in a resounding crescendo at the final moment. He would do it all for that, for the symphony that was forged as a result of the fear, the excitement. The pain.
That’s why he was there, after all. To create such a stupendous pain in the people they supplied.
Well, that was not technically true. Technically he was there for many, many more reasons. Glorified kidnapper being one, rubber duck watcher another.
But the pain. That was his favorite.
Though usually the pain was accompanied by a distinct factor of more—the unraveling of the universe and all that.
Not this time. This was only an ordinary body, with no spark of the otherworldly in sight.
The man didn’t care.
Maybe others would, but he found purpose enough for himself in the beauty of what he could fashion there, with or without the ulterior motive. In some ways, one could say that having a secondary reason for the pain only tarnished it, whereas this belonged solely to him. This moment, right here.
The man took a deep breath, savoring the complete ambiance of the space he was in, before he turned back to his subject and assessed his options. Settling on a different, more precise tool—one with a much sharper edge—the man once more lifted his arm and continued with his ordained task.
From a different room, a set of eyes casually observed on a screen as the man set to work on his masterpiece, nodding once in approval before turning away. The screen left on displayed the white walls, no longer pristine, which echoed back the horrendous chorus the man’s work produced.
Chapter Two
There was an elderly man Everly had never seen before standing behind all the black-clad patrons, and his eyes had been focused on her for the duration of the service.
She blinked and realized that wasn’t quite right. There was an elderly man Everly recognized, as if from a dream, as if from a memory, lodged deep and low down in the recesses of her brain. She squinted at him, because if she could just . . .
She blinked again, and of course she knew him, why wouldn’t she know him, why would she ever not recognize—
Blink. Everly shook her head. The man was still there, and she didn’t know why a second before she had recognized him, because she did not, though she felt oddly unsettled by the memory of recognizing the man. Not as unsettled as she was, however, by his mere presence or by the fact of his staring at her.
He was too far away for her to actually see his eyes, to know for sure, but she could feel his attention pierced on her like a dagger through her spleen. The sensation was disconcerting, but in a strange way she appreciated the man and the mystery he presented. It gave her something to focus on. Something to puzzle over.
Someone to look at other than the form in the coffin on the elevated platform in front of her.
The man wore a bowler hat over his tufted gray hair, and a brown tweed coat, which worked even further to set him apart from the sea of faces that encircled him—the rest of whom were all adorned in shades of black or blackish blue, all at least a little familiar to Everly. The friends, the coworkers, the distant acquaintances and associates.
But not the family. There was no other family. None but her.
The preacher had finished speaking, Everly realized with a start, and was gesturing for her to step forward. She didn’t want to. She wanted to go back to pondering the mystery of the peculiar man in the bowler hat, trying to work out how he had found his way there, and why, but they were all staring at her, so she stood, refusing to breathe as she crossed the distance between her chair and the platform ahead of her. A sharp pang flashed through her skull when she reached the front. Everly gritted her teeth, resisting the urge to lift a hand to the side of her temple.
She couldn’t look at the body. They had asked if she wanted to beforehand, to make sure he looked okay—like himself, she supposed—but she knew it would be no use. He would never look like himself. Never again.
A car accident had led her here, to this raised platform, in front of all the vaguely familiar forms in black and the solitary strange one in brown. Or at least, that is what they had told her, when it was already too late for the cause to even matter.
But according to them, it had been a car accident, and so he hadn’t been quite right. Or his body hadn’t been. They told her it would be okay if she didn’t want an open coffin, but she wasn’t able to stand the thought of locking him up in there any sooner than she needed to. So even though she refused now to look, she kept him out in the open. She kept him free.
Afterward, Everly was ushered to a dimly lit reception room, where she had scarcely a moment to herself before the other mourners came flooding in to report how very sorry they were, how devastating of a loss it must be, how much she would be kept in their prayers. Everly hardly heard any of them. She leaned against one of the whitewashed walls of the hall and rubbed her temple, trying not to close her eyes, though she wanted nothing more than to shut out everything and everyone around her. She wanted them all to go back, to their lives and their families and their homes. She wanted to go back.
But back to what, she couldn’t help but ask herself. Back to the empty house with too many rooms and the life that she wasn’t sure she could picture any longer in his absence.
Her father’s absence.
She was too young, all of Everly’s neighbors had tried to claim. Too young to be all alone. But at twenty-four, she was hardly a child anymore, and really, what would anyone have done anyway? Where would she have gone?
She had nowhere else to go, no one else to go to, and they knew it as well as she did.
