A woman and a little girl, holding hands. The September breeze, cooling into autumn, whispering through cracks in freestanding walls, sighing eerily around jutting black chimneys and the ashen stumps of trees long hauled away. What little remained of Bethany’s Sin had been...
—Revelation 13:4 Chapter 11 ––––––––– HE HAD WOKEN at six o’clock and was now sitting in the breakfast nook of his quiet apartment, reading the morning newspaper as the sun threw purple shadows along the cobblestoned street below. This was his time of the day, befor...
Matthew had heard their squeakings and rustlings all the afternoon, but they’d not yet made an appearance. He’d been relieved to find that the rodents had not emerged to attack either his lunch or supper—meager beef broth and two slices of black bread, humble but stomach-filling—but now, ever sin...
In the sultry twilight gloom, the place looked as if Sherman had already passed through. Flint Murtaugh guided his car past a rusted cannon that defiantly faced the north. A tattered Confederate flag drooped on its warped pole. The motel’s office was constructed to resemble a miniature plantation...
He rinsed the blade off in the washbasin, wiped the remainder of soap from his face with the damp washcloth, and then combed his hair. Regarding his reflection in the polished glass, he knew he had come a long way from the orphanage to this moment. He was looking at a gentleman who had in his eye...
Clair Usher slowly gave up her secrets to Rix. It was almost one o'clock, and Rix had been reading through her diary since before eleven, when he'd excused himself from the game room after Katt had whipped his tail in chess. She'd been thoughtful and precise in her moves, ...
Lawson felt the sun sinking. Always it was so, and never could he explain to Father Deale what that sensation was. Even wrapped like a mummy in his black curtains and hidden under bedsheets or sometimes under the bed or in a closet, he felt the sun sinking. With his eyes closed and his bod...
Vance whispered shakily. “Maybe it meant somewhere else.” “No, I don’t think so.” Rhodes spoke in a normal voice. There was no need for whispering, because Stinger had to know they were waiting in Creech’s den. He aimed his flashlight at the hole in the floor. There was no...
Striking skin; bullets with eyes of dried blood. Clinging to smooth stone, fortress walls, sleeping in chunks of shade that creep; shadow icebergs. Tourists. Heat. Salty half-moons under armpits. Sandals scuffing ancient rock. Turkish cigarettes. Lovers hold humid hands. A deserted city. Long dea...