Wickedly funny dark humor horror novel that blends supernatural horror with a thrilling murder mystery.
âWhat a page turner! Witty, literate, scary, sexy, and powerfully evocativeâ
-Gayle Lynds, New York Times bestselling author.
Itâs 1982. His name, Steve Witowski, is an alias. Once he was a counterculture hero. Now heâs a failed songwriter, running from the law. And heâs just become a killer, rescuing a woman from an horrific assault by what seemed to be the strongest wino in California. Steve should keep moving. But the woman, Victoria, is byond stunning. Oddly, sheâs recently bought a decrepit old church, with notorious past. Will Steve stay and help? Of course. Even as the face of the man he just killed materializes on his arm. And Victoria becomes just a part of a mystery he canât unravel. Until heâs looting the decomposing dead for the secrets of a self-proclaimed sorcerer. And the mystery becomes a nightmare of fire and blood and death. The Sorcererâs spells and rituals couldnât actually work, of course. Until they do. And unknown to Steve, a demon is growing desperate.
"An enormous amount of fun . . . I loved it."
-David Moody, author of Hater and Autumn
Wickedly funny dark humor horror novel that blends supernatural horror with a thrilling murder mystery.
âWhat a page turner! Witty, literate, scary, sexy, and powerfully evocativeâ
-Gayle Lynds, New York Times bestselling author.
Itâs 1982. His name, Steve Witowski, is an alias. Once he was a counterculture hero. Now heâs a failed songwriter, running from the law. And heâs just become a killer, rescuing a woman from an horrific assault by what seemed to be the strongest wino in California. Steve should keep moving. But the woman, Victoria, is byond stunning. Oddly, sheâs recently bought a decrepit old church, with notorious past. Will Steve stay and help? Of course. Even as the face of the man he just killed materializes on his arm. And Victoria becomes just a part of a mystery he canât unravel. Until heâs looting the decomposing dead for the secrets of a self-proclaimed sorcerer. And the mystery becomes a nightmare of fire and blood and death. The Sorcererâs spells and rituals couldnât actually work, of course. Until they do. And unknown to Steve, a demon is growing desperate.
"An enormous amount of fun . . . I loved it."
-David Moody, author of Hater and Autumn
On Wednesday October 13th, 1968, a faculty panel recommended the dismissal of Professor John Harrisâin absentia, as no one at Harvard had seen or heard from him in weeks. Harris later bragged about delivering his final lecture on âone shitload and a half of LSD.â According to the recording made available to the faculty panel, this was the sum total of that lecture:
âGood afternoon. Wow. American Literature, hunh? Letâs see. Moby Dick today. Right?â
âMoby Dick?â asked a confused voice. âNo. What happened to The Scarlet Letter?â
âRight. Moby Dick,â Harris continued. âGreat book. None of you have read it. None of you are going to read it. Nobody ever does. What you need to understand is that as far as Iâm concernedâand Iâm the fucking professorâMoby Dick is the same story as The Great Gatsby, which some of you may read. I call it, âthe half-assed struggle of the individual to put their world to rights in the face of a failure that threatens to define their life.â I think thatâs from my thesis. Though maybe itâs not pretentious enough.â
Harris laughed. âHey! How about this? Great Gatsby/Moby Dick: same story, different era, right? So, if someone someday tries to write that story for this generation, they should call it The Great Dick. Thatâd be perfect, wouldnât it? The Great Dick. Alright, thatâs got to be almost fifty minutes. See you next . . . whenever. Wow.â
SUNDAY, MARCH 21, 1982
Two Women and One Corpse
âAny fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to lie well.â
âSamuel Johnson
CHAPTER 1
Okay, let me start out by admitting that I was an asshole. I know that. The ludicrous amount of fame and acclaim and money Iâve had dumped on me since that time only makes it more glaring. The fact that we lived in a different world back in 1982 is no excuse. It was the same world. It just wasnât the world we thought it was.
I remember it was a Sunday night. Sundays always feel different. Looking back now and Googling a 1982 calendar, Iâd guess it was Sunday, March 21st. I remember waking up and within minutes making the decision to leave. Quickly, before I could change my mind, I eased myself out of the rickety hideâaâbed.
Immediately, Maria rolled over into the spot I'd just vacated, breathing loudly through her nose and mouth, not quite snoring. I hate to say it, but she looked every minute of her thirty years. Her thick dark hair clung damply to her face; her heavy arms stretched outward. The cast on her left wrist looked like a giant manacle.
The grandfather clock beside the cigar store Indian read 1:37, though a few minutes before, it had chimed four times. That made as much sense as anything else in my life. I was thirty-five years old, a Harvard grad whoâd spent the previous two years faking his way through a $13,500 a year job as a territory rep for the Richmond Tobacco company. That $13,500 was the most money Iâd ever made. Youâre probably thinking that when you adjust for inflation and translate that $13,500 into todayâs dollars, itâs a lot more impressive.
No, itâs not.
I slipped on my jersey and my jeans and gathered the rest of my things in my old gym bag. Fortunately, enough moonlight crept in around the edges of the tattered drapes to give the room a dim glow. I wondered if it would be safe to hitchhike out of there, or if Indiana had already notified the California Highway Patrol that I was wanted.
My situation was bad. But not bad enough to, say, crawl into a grave with a rotting corpse.
That would come later.
Carefully, I wove my way through the assorted clutter and opened the front door to let in more light. The scents of honeysuckle and the sea mingled with the roomâs stale air. For some weird reason, with my life in shambles, the old, abandoned church across the way suddenly reminded me that briefly, as a child, Iâd wanted to be a priestâthough not as much as I wanted to be Zorro. Iâd read the fourth-grade version of The Lives of the Saints, and I thought if I became a missionary I could have a shot at sainthood, maybe even martyrdom. Which was as good as you could get saint-wise. Another realistic goal I hadn't quite achieved. But at least that one was when I was nine.
It took a while, but I finally found a pen on a table back over by the hide-a-bed. Maria had kicked off the covers. I pulled them back up around her. Something clattered to the floor. A diaphragm case, recognizable even in the faint light, probably beige, maybe pink. We hadn't had sex that night, though I'd realized she'd wanted to. If I stayed with her I wouldn't be in the mood more often than not. Maria's body was the earthâmother type I once found so plushly erotic. But in bed and in the back seat of the car that afternoon, all I could see were stretchâmarked breasts and puckered thighs.
Okay, I already admitted I was an asshole. And no saint. Itâs going to get worse.
I tore a piece off a Kentucky Fried Chicken bag and tried to work out a goodâbye lie. Something that might leave Maria with a soft memory instead of an acid stomach. She wasn't falling in love with me, and I wasn't breaking her heart, but I had mentioned that once we got to California I might settle down in this area. I'd meant it when I'd said it; going as long as I had without sex can lead to an overactive imagination and the emotional equivalent of premature ejaculation.
But that imagination deserted me now on the note. I finally started it with the truth, explaining that I was running from a drug bust.
"I was no big-time dealer,â I wrote. âA friend and I just tried for one good score and messed up. But in Indiana the minimum sentence would be seventeen years, and I couldn't handle jail again. Not anymore. Not for seventeen days."
So much so true. Then I did get creative. "Now I've discovered that I'm not safe even out here."
Since I couldn't figure out when or how I could have made this discovery, I kept it vague. Fortunately, a note wouldn't have to answer questions.
"So, I've got to go. To stay out of jail, and to keep you from getting involved in my crime. Thanks again for the ride and everything. You helped a stranger when he needed it most. I wish we had more time. You're a wonderful lady, and I'm very, very attracted to you. Be sure to thank your uncle for putting me up tonight, and for being so nice. And best of luck with your new life.â
I signed it, "Love, Steve."
I stopped short of telling her she was too good for meâa blatant brushâoffâthough of course she was. The "very, very attracted," was probably overkill. I was making amends for not getting it up in the motel that morning. Fortunately, our second attempt, in the car, had been better. Although it still took me awhile and she must have known I didn't cum. I hadnât had much practice faking orgasms.
Her jacket hung over a nearby chair, and I stuck the tab of the zipper through the note, so she couldn't miss it. My own jacket wasn't around. When weâd arrived, the evening was so balmy I must have left it in Maria's car with my sleeping bag. No problem, I was sure the car was unlocked. Almost sure.
In spite of the dim light and the junk all over the room, I managed to get outside without knocking anything over. I crossed the concrete slab to the car, stepping between two ancient gas pumps, humming a sophomoric lament under my breath. Once more my subconscious had dug out an appropriate soundtrack, a song I'd written years before. I decided to take a moment to roll a joint to bring with me and smoke before I hit the road.
The car was an old Checker cab with a back seat that smelled like a urinal. Three and a half days ago, I'd talked my way insideâin a rest stop a few miles outside of Hamilton, Illinois. I was rumpled and maybe even a touch wildâeyedâif not particularly threatening. At first Maria told me she was only going as far as Iowa, which was just across the river. Within fifteen miles, with a relieved and embarrassed grin, she admitted the truth, and fifty miles later I was sharing the driving. I was never particularly conscious of that smell until the previous afternoon, parked out on that deserted back road near the ArizonaâCalifornia border, tangled up with Maria in the back seat. With the stench of piss in my nostrils and the corner of one of her paintings digging into my bare hip, it wasnât exactly a romance novel.
Now I climbed into the shotgun seat and cracked a window, letting in the cool night breeze along with the throb of the nearby surf and then the rumble of a semi down on the highway. My jacket wasn't anywhere in the car. Shit! The planâto the extent there was a planâwas to head down to Estero Beach just south of Ensenada. My sleeping bag had fallen apart back in Jerome, Arizona; Iâd need that jacket. What had I done with it?
And then I remembered.
The damn jacket was locked in the trunk. The only way in was with the key.
Brilliant.
Oh well, maybe a face-to-face goodbye was what was called for anyway. Though it would be messier for me and possibly more painful for Maria. The note had been fairly believable. Face to face, Iâd probably screw it up. I started to get out of the car, then decided I might as well roll that joint first.
I thought I heard a small cry. I paused, listening. Probably an owl.
"Nowhere to go, nowhere to stay," I sang softly. âWandering down the dark highway."
Christ, I'd really had a way with a cliché even then. In 1966, we'd all been vagabonds. Supposedly. I wrote the song in an expensive dorm my freshman year at Harvard. Fortunately, originality hadn't been an admissions requirement.
How had I ever allowed myself to believe for all those years that I could become a songwriter? Though during my "musical" years, I had made it to vagabond. My fellow alumni might have said, âbum.â
Through the open window came a snatch of what sounded like a distant conversation. It could have been a TV, except there were only two buildings in sightâand one was dark and the other apparently abandoned. But who would be chatting out here in the middle of nowhere at 1:45 in the morning?
I found the pot right away, but I had to rummage through everything else in my gym bag to find the papers. Not that I had all that much to rummage through. Just what I always carried with me in the trunk of the Richmond Tobacco company carâshampoo, deodorant, toothbrush, toothpaste, a change of underwearâplus a few extra shirts and things I bought at a Salvation Army store in Chicago before ditching the car in front of Richmond's regional headquarters.
A can of hair spray fell out and landed on my lap. I never used it except at big sales meetings or when the upper brass was riding with me. No need for that anymore, but I shoved it back into the bag.
Now I definitely heard human voices. I couldnât make out the words, but the anger was unmistakable.
I had one cigarette paper left.
Another semi roared by, trailed by several cars. Their headlights winked along the line of trees and bushes bordering the road. The squat cinder block house Maria's uncle lived in was once a store on the old Pacific Coast Highway. Now the new road curved around the house a hundred yards to the south and west, isolating the house and the old church in an empty field.
The new road was still only one lane north, one lane south. Serious traffic took Highway 101, twenty miles inland.
One of the voices was definitely a woman, the other clearly a man. Maybe theyâd broken down over on the highway. I envisioned a couple arguing while changing a tire.
A small stick in the pot poked a hole in the cigarette paper. The marijuana was cheap and as usual I hadn't bothered to clean it properly. I almost never smoked dope anymore; I just kept it around from force of habit. I'd brought it with me by accident, forgetting it had been in the bag in the car. That was stupid, and it would be idiotic to hitchhike any farther with it. People were still doing serious jail time for tiny amountsâeven in California. And of course, once I was fingerprinted, things would quickly get a whole lot worse.
The shriek was torturedâshrill and sexlessâsingeing with a hotâice chill. Once again, I envisioned a man and a woman down by the highway. But now one of them was impaling the other with the tire iron.
CHAPTER 2
The shriekâs residue seemed to hang in the air. Suddenly, I felt alone and exposed. Maria's uncle, Jonathan OâRyan was old and halfâsenile; his closest neighbor might be all the way back in Santa Lucia, ten miles away. The joint lay shattered in my lap. The pot was sprinkled across my jeans. I held my breath, listening, mentally rerunning the cry. It had been mindless, hadn't it? An animal, run over and dying by the roadside. It'd come from that direction.
Of course, the voices had come from that direction as well.
The second shriek felt electricâas if I was feeling it as well as hearing it. Was there actually a prickling in my fingers and among the hairs of the beard that traced my jawline? Quieter, yet overfilled with terror and painâor could it have been fury?âit wasn't any animal.
It wasnât any animal.
For a heartbeat, I sat there. I noticed the plainâfaced Chesterfield girl painted on the wall of the old store had lost her nose. The small copse of trees behind the buildingâthough nowhere near the screamingânow seemed alive and menacing.
I climbed out of the car, slamming the door loudly behind me, whether to scare off villains orâlike a biker revving his engineâto show my potency, I wasn't sure. I told myself that things that go bump in the night almost always turn out to be nothing. Two cats getting romantic in the moonlight. It wasnât any animal. Maybe a couple of teenagers with a couple of six packs. Maybe a lovers' quarrel. Him coaxing her back into the car, and her doling out some piercingly loud psychic punishment before coming around. Odds were good Jack the Ripper and the Manson Family hadnât joined forces someplace in the darkness ahead.
Still, heading for the highway, I skulked through the undergrowth like it was a mine field. As I got closer, the grass gave way to ice plant riddled with bottles and cans and paper. I was still hanging on to my gym bag. I thought about going back for the lead pipe Maria and I had found under the old cab's front seat the day before. But I really wasnât a lead pipe kind of guy.
A sheltered clearing held the remains of several campfires. The junction of state road 64 from Bakersfield was a half mile to the north, making this a perfect campground for transients.
I stumbled upon a narrow path and followed it between two large bushes. In front of me, a small embankment led down to the road. A cursory examination and I'd be out of there. Through a lull in the traffic, the ocean's soothing backbeat sounded close, somewhere just on the other side of the road.
I almost stepped on them.
"Damn you, you frigid bitch," the man sputtered at the woman struggling beneath him. He let out a small, pained cry and muttered something incomprehensible that almost sounded like Latin.
He was tall and thin but wiryâa praying mantis overwhelming a butterfly. She held off his right arm with both hands. He flailed at her with his left.
I froze. For an eternal halfâinstant. I was aware, without actually focusing, of their labored breathing and soft grunts, of the scent of pinecones, of water running under the highway through a flood control ditch, of a vehicle approaching.
A sliver of reflected light flashed in the man's right handâa knife, oddly shaped and the color of the moonlight. The lead pipe was back in the cab. A car rounded the corner, lighting the scene. I was staring into the frightened, pleading eyes of the womanâwatching her watch me as I did nothing. Finally, I started forward. Then the hand clutching the knife was free. It swooped downward. She gasped. He leaped off her, spun around, and smashed into my chest. Clinging together we toppled over, rolling and sliding down the ice plant covered embankment toward the road.
An elbow caught me in the Adam's apple. My head slammed into the asphalt. I grabbed a handful of his hair, and he flipped over on top of me, rolling us farther out into the street. A horn sounded. The tires of another car hummed by my headâthe wind in their wake a warm breath against my skin. He flung dirt or something in my face. It missed my eyes, but my mouth was open; the grit had a sour, metallic taste and smelled like decaying garbage.
I smashed my knee up into him, trying for his groin and hitting his leg. He must have lost the knife because he was crushing my throat with both hands, lifting me off the ground, forcing me out ahead of him into the road. Clutching his jacket, I tried to pull myself down his body, back toward safety. Loose pebbles ground into my skin. I couldn't breathe.
The gaunt face inches from my own reeked of alcohol. Wizened, with a stubbly beard and hair that grew in unhealthy clumps around his head, he was at least fifty, possibly older. Christ, I thought, I was being murdered by the strongest wino in California. My right hand stumbled into his coat pocket, seized on a heavy metal key ring and yanked it out.
Darkness constricted the edges of my vision. The night was pounding rhythmically. Still, I caught the animal terror in the bulging eyes staring down at me.
I lashed out, the keys clenched in my fist like a roll of nickels, but I got no real force behind the blow. Under the pressure of his hands, my throat was collapsing inward. My lungs were on fire. I tried to slash the keys into his face, but they slipped from my hand. Instead, I gouged with my fingers, rending the flesh, groping for an eye. Fabric tore somewhere, and another horn blasted. I was going limp, melting into the night, giving up. Tires squealed. Close. I jerked my head around.
âIntroibo ad altare dei,â he repeated, clearer this time. It was Latin.
âAd deum qui laetificat juventutem meam,â I croaked out in response.
This novel is an extremely fun, often laugh out loud funny, and twisty supernatural mystery that'll have you turning pages well into the night once you start reading.
A man named Steve (not his real name) is the narrator and it's set in the early 80s. He's a failed songwriter on the run from the law when he and a friend did a drug deal. Come to find out, both the person they bought the drugs from and the person they sold them to wear undercover cops. One night, while driving through a small town, Steve intervenes on behalf of a woman named Victoria who is being attacked by a man. Being a man on the run, Steve accepts her offer to stay with her and help renovate her home, a former church and a former house of ill repute. The man who ran the whorehouse (that's what it's referred as in the book) was into magic, spells, and all manner of supernatural things.
Steve is obsessed with Victoria, a perfect woman in his opinion, and tries to bed her with no success. In fact, Victoria seems to take pleasure in teasing him and watching him squirm. But when certain people die and strange things start happening, the relationship and everything else is going to get twisted. And as secrets are revealed about the building, the former owner, and Victoria herself, it's going to go full on supernatural horrors.
The characters in here are so imperfect and flawed that you can't help but to relate in one way or another. They might not be all good but they are entertaining and loveable at times. We know Victoria isn't quite right but the full extent of that is horrifying. Several great twists will be revealed right up until the end making this a compulsive read. I highly recommend it.