As the Crow Flies Read online

  As the Crow Flies

  Enter Haddonwood Book One

  Rysa Walker

  Caleb Amsel

  Copyright © 2019 by Rysa Walker and Caleb Amsel

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, and events are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual locations, events, or people, living or dead, is coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be used or reproduced by any means without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations included in critical articles and reviews.

  For information:

  www.rysa.com

  www.enterhaddonwood.com

  For every child who has sought refuge from real terrors

  between the pages of a scary book.

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  1. ENTER HADDONWOOD

  CHAPTER TWO

  1. CHASE

  2. DAISY

  3. BEN

  4. TUCKER

  5. DAISY

  6. RAUM

  CHAPTER THREE

  1. DAISY

  2. TUCKER

  3. ZOPHIEL

  4. BEN

  5. JULIE

  6. DAISY

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1. JULIE

  2. CHASE

  3. TUCKER

  4. DAISY

  5. BEN

  6. RAUM

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1. CHASE

  2. JULIE

  3. DAISY

  4. BEN

  5. TUCKER

  6. ZOPHIEL

  CHAPTER SIX

  1. CHASE

  2. TUCKER

  3. DAISY

  4. JULIE

  5. CHASE

  6. BEN

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  1. DAISY

  2. TUCKER

  3. LUKE

  4. BEN

  5. TUCKER

  6. JULIE

  7. DAISY

  8. TUCKER

  EPILOGUE

  COMING SOON

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Also by Rysa Walker

  About the Author: Rysa Walker

  About the Author: Caleb Amsel

  PROLOGUE

  The old woman sits perfectly still except for her left hand, which drags the stub of a pencil across the paper, leaving a trail of tiny precise circles in its wake. She doesn’t look down at the pad but keeps her eyes fixed on the tree outside the window. When her hand reaches the edge of the paper, she pulls the pencil back to the left, forming a thin line beneath the row of circles she’s just finished. Once the pencil enters the left margin, the process begins again. If the lead breaks or goes dull, she carries on, the circles growing fainter and fainter, sometimes becoming mere indentations in the page, unless one of the attendants notices and swaps the used pencil for a fresh one.

  Sometimes, Maggie draws squares or triangles instead. Long ago, it was crochet that occupied her hands, but the staff grew tired of ripping out all of those chain stitches to keep her equipped with a steady supply of yarn.

  These days, her hands are too gnarled and twisted for crochet, anyway. She clutches the pencil with a death grip, and even a casual observer would suspect this task is excruciating for fingers so clearly arthritic. But Maggie Yarrow persists, circle after painstaking circle.

  Maggie still has good days, now and then. Days when she snaps out of it long enough to play a game of Scrabble or canasta with some of the other patients. But more and more often over the last few years, Maggie sits with pad and pencil, all of her processing ability focused inward, with only her active hand and the occasional blink of her powder-blue eyes linking her to this world.

  Her remaining days, good or bad, are few. The deceptively young-looking woman sitting next to Maggie knows this. The medical staff here call this young woman Sophie and believe that she’s Maggie’s niece. But Maggie outlived all of her actual family members. She’s been a ward of the State of Tennessee since her father died in the 1950s, back when hospitals like this one were more often known as sanitariums.

  If someone decides to do an autopsy when Maggie is finally gone, or if the hospital donates her brain to a university, scientists will discover a surface that’s a bit smoother than most, the folds between the gyri too shallow in many places to form solid and reliable connections. A brain poorly suited for Maggie to function normally in a complex world, to be sure, but it was exactly what Sophie had been seeking. And soon, she will have to find another one, although that’s not a hard task in a place like this. She’s already scouted out a few possibilities.

  Had Sophie not intervened when Maggie was a young girl, her tantrums and seizures would have inevitably led doctors to employ the cutting-edge treatments of that era. Literally cutting-edge in the case of lobotomy, but also shock therapy. Drugs so strong they could render a horse into a stupor. Left to the whims of 1920s psychiatry, Maggie would likely have spent her life in cages far less pleasant than these somewhat austere but sun-filled rooms. This is why Sophie doesn’t waste much time on feeling guilty about Maggie’s condition. Her situation could have been far worse.

  But a trickle of guilt does creep in from time to time. Had she been wrong all those years ago to listen to the small, still voice that told her this was Divine Will? Was that little voice nothing more than her ego, bolstered by a vain desire to right the balance that she knew, knew at her very core, was slipping?

  Maybe. But those were questions for before she made her choice. Now it is after, and the deed is long since done. Someone out there might be able to unwind time, but that was, as the saying goes, above her paygrade. Above the paygrade of any member of the Seventy-Two, for that matter.

  Sophie leans forward to place a tender hand against the side of the old woman’s face. She feels a rush of almost maternal affection for Maggie, whose own mother fought for nearly forty years to have her daughter released. What kind of monster, her mother had once cried, would willingly lock her child in a cage?

  And that’s really the question at the core of everything, isn’t it? What kind of monster indeed?

  CHAPTER ONE

  FIVE YEARS LATER

  One

  ENTER HADDONWOOD

  The crow sails through the broken window, pointing her sleek black head downhill toward the trees. Inside the frail body, her tiny heart pounds rapidly. Too rapidly? Perhaps. Something feels off this morning. She doesn’t think she was detected coming through. And even if she was, she has the right to observe.

  Soon the crow is soaring above the autumn-fire branches now becoming visible against the dawn sky. Below her, the woods break apart, first in small patches and then completely, giving way to cornfields and meadows as she glides on. A town emerges, rising from the mist in little pinpricks of light. There appears to be no order, no pattern or plan in the layout of the town. It looks like something that happened organically over the years, with one shelter following another and then another as new roads cut through the farmland.

  That’s how it looks. But the bird knows better. She’s seen the schematics.

  Sycamore Acres, near the edge of town, is the crow’s first stop. She lands on the edge of the window, wishing it was a house with actual wooden ledges instead of a trailer with just this narrow strip of metal. Clutching the rim with her talons, she inches to the left in order to peer through a tiny gap in the broken plastic blinds.

  The boy, Chase Rey, sleeps on a narrow mattress supported by brightly colored milk crates. His older brother glued them together a few years ago to give Chase a spot to store books and toys he’s outgrown but isn’t quite ready to throw away—battered trucks, a
stuffed bear, a scuffed-up baseball. There’s also a toy monkey in the mix that used to grin and clap its cymbals until the boy broke its arm off, more or less on purpose. The monkey was a rare gift from their father, who knew full well it would creep his youngest son out. Chase keeps the thing in the crate under his bed, not from any sentimental attachment, but simply to show Ralph Rey that he did not win that round. It’s a feeble act of defiance, but one of the few that Chase can risk without fear of reprisal.

  Across the small room, the second bed is empty. Ben, the boy’s brother, is already up. The crow can hear water running in the bathroom. She can also smell the dried blood on the pillowcase and sense the rage just below the surface of the older boy’s thoughts.

  These vibes that the bird picks up in her surveillance are not things a normal crow would intuit. But the part of her brain that is a normal crow is not engaged today. It sleeps, metaphorical head tucked under metaphorical wing. This morning, the bird is less crow than living drone. A spy, if you will. She is here as an observer, to ensure that everything is in proper order.

  The part of the crow that is not-crow would like to believe that, after all this time, her surveillance is no longer necessary. But they wouldn’t even be in this situation if Raum always adhered to the rules. She knew from the beginning that he would tilt toward the dark by nature. It was in his very name when he arrived, unplanned and with barely any warning.

  Still, she’s been known to bend a rule or two herself. If she had stayed firm, if she had stuck to the letter of the law, this child tossing restlessly in his bed would be irrelevant. If she hadn’t let Raum convince her that he needed more, that he needed a real challenge, this slip of a boy would never have broken through. But eight decades of stability have a way of lulling one into complacency.

  As the crow watches, the boy shivers, pulling the covers close around his pale shoulders and pressing his back to the thin plywood wall. Does he sense her watching on some subconscious level? Has a curious crow entered his dream?

  Perhaps. He is no more an ordinary boy than she is an ordinary bird.

  Now that the crow is certain that the center continues to hold, she flies at a more leisurely pace, circling the small town. Most of Haddonwood’s residents are still asleep, but a few lights are beginning to blink on. It is October thirty-first, six in the morning. Autumn has kissed the land overnight—late, some would say—turning all the green shade trees to fiery orange and crisp yellow. The world from the day before, the one that was gripped tightly in the hands of a brilliant Indian summer, is gone.

  As she nears the edge of town, the crow spots a tall black man in his early twenties standing on the back deck of his house. A tiny red dot hovers in front of his face like a scarlet firefly, growing brighter as he inhales. Luke Randall is the first person up this morning. The first person up every morning. He stares across the barren plot of land he can’t afford and should never have bought, wondering how he ended up in this utter shitshow of a marriage.

  The crow lands on the deck a few feet away from Luke, who takes one more long pull on the cigarette before crushing it out. He promised Carly he’d quit when the baby was born, but he still sneaks a smoke in the morning if he manages to get downstairs without waking Carly or the baby. One or two at work, sometimes, depending on how long it is until payday and how much of his next few paychecks Carly has already spent. God knows he needs something, some little thing to look forward to after hours of shoving plastic bits into the grinder.

  Luke is thinking (not for the first time or the last) that he will leave Carly. He’ll move to Atlanta, where he won’t be forced to live a lie. But that thought is followed by a flash of memory from the night before—a chubby hand grasping his finger, two solemn brown eyes staring up into his own—and his resolve fades away.

  When he notices the crow near his feet, he stares at her for a long time, even says hello in a voice hoarse from sleep and last night’s screaming match. If the man senses her otherness, her not-crowness, he shrugs it off, preoccupied with his thoughts of the long day and the long years ahead.

  Nothing has changed at the Randall house. Nothing ever really has, and the crow doubts that it ever will.

  And so she flies on.

  Across the cornfield, just beyond a narrow patch of trees, a light flickers on inside a small kitchen. The crow perches on the elm tree in the backyard and watches as Scott Jenkins makes coffee. His mind is on the sermon at last Sunday’s service, which, like all of Reverend Kennedy’s sermons, had no fire, no whiff of brimstone, not even a mention of the wages of sin. And that simply will not do.

  As Scott toys with the idea of calling a meeting of the church deacons to consider the preacher’s removal, his daughter Marybeth sleeps on in the next room, still dreaming. These days, very few of her dreams, whether asleep or awake, feature Benjamin Rey. But she hasn’t found a way to tell him that yet.

  It would be easy to get caught up in their thoughts and dreams, but the Jenkins family is not on the crow’s to-do list. They are merely a curiosity. Peripheral, at best.

  And so she flies on, peering briefly into a few houses along the outskirts of town as their occupants rise, stretch, and get ready to begin another day in Haddonwood. She would like to listen in, because she is curious by nature. But they are not on her list.

  Her next official stop is inside Haddonwood proper. She lands on the top of the police cruiser parked outside the home of Tucker Vance. Tucker, the youngest officer on Haddonwood’s three-person police force, is frying an egg while his coffee brews. There’s usually little to see or hear at the Vance house. Most mornings, Tucker simply goes through the motions as though he’s in a holding pattern, waiting for…something. This morning, however, the hand holding the spatula shakes as it flips the egg. Something has rattled him. The bird doesn’t know what that might be, however. Tucker’s thoughts are oddly opaque this morning. The only flash she picks up is a red handprint.

  This inability to read him bothers her. But she can’t really afford to hang around. There are more stops on her route. Raum might be resting now, but he won’t rest all day.

  And so she flies on. Not far this time. Just a few flaps of her dark wings and she’s perched on a branch outside Daisy Gray’s bedroom. A moment later, Daisy pulls back the thin curtain and looks out at the house next door. There is no barrier to Daisy’s thoughts, and the crow rides the stream of the girl’s internal monologue as easily as a wind current. Like Raum, Daisy isn’t a big fan of early mornings. But Tucker’s shift usually starts at seven, and her day always feels wrong if she isn’t awake in time to spot his police car in the drive. She doesn’t have to actually see him to lift her mood, although it’s a plus. The sight of the car, the visual reminder that he is still there, just as he was when she turned in for the night, is enough to ease her mind.

  Daisy doesn’t linger at the window. Her other incentive for rising early is the home’s pathetically small water heater. She’ll be rinsing the soap away with ice-cold water if her sister beats her to the shower. That rarely happens, though, and it seems especially unlikely this morning. Dani is in her room with her black comforter scrunched up around her like a shroud, catching as much sleep as she can after what was apparently a late night. She told their dad she was studying with friends, but Daisy knows better—her sister cracked more beers than books last night.

  She slides her feet into the pink raccoon slippers Dani gave her last Christmas, wondering (not for the first time) why her sister picked pink raccoons. Wondering, for that matter, why they even make pink raccoon slippers. But the slippers are warm, and that’s the important thing. She hates the icy chill of the hardwood floor in the mornings and wishes her mother hadn’t yanked up all the carpet in the house the year before she died. Jenny Gray had spent the whole summer sanding and polishing these wooden planks, claiming that carpet was harder to keep clean, and wasn’t it a shame to hide such beautiful wood? The renovation was hot, dirty work, and most of the time, her hands had been cha
fed raw by nightfall. She’d tried and failed to interest her daughters in the project. They’d been around fourteen at the time, and Daisy feels a twinge of guilt as she remembers how, despite having nowhere to go and nothing to do, she had found every possible excuse to avoid helping her mom.

  Such thoughts are not a good way to start the morning, however, especially on a day that will be packed from start to finish. An interview for the school paper. A math test, for which she’s mostly prepared. And once school is over, she still has several hours of work ahead to get things ready for the FrightFest, something she’s been looking forward to ever since she began the part-time job at the Hart Theater a little over a month ago.

  As she heads for the shower, she hears the morning news on the tiny kitchen TV. The smell of coffee wafts up the stairs in a delicious wave. A homey scent. Comfortable. She passes her sister’s room, which is still dead silent, then steps into the bathroom. Once the water heats up, she slips beneath the spray and lets her thoughts roam, totally unsurprised to discover that they’ve roamed next door to where Tucker is probably having breakfast. She pictures him with cereal instead of the egg and toast that the crow observed, but she nails the feeling of loneliness. Tucker’s mom and dad were killed in a car accident only a few months before he finished high school. Daisy remembers sitting in the sanctuary with her parents and Dani, never imagining that in a few short years, it would be her own mother lying in a coffin at the front of the church.