“I’m fine, Mom.”
Or else, “You know, the young farmer who came to deliver the hay for your animals . . . He’s a good guy, and he’s strong,” her mother told her with sparkling eyes and a knowing smile.
“Yes, I’m happy for him, Mom. He’ll probably find a girlfriend at the Sunday dance.”
All her will went into restoring the farm and working her land. She didn’t need help and certainly didn’t need company. Isolation was necessary for her to put herself back together, and in any case, she no longer planned to have a family.
Sometimes, at night, when she couldn’t fall asleep despite her exhaustion, she studied Ravenwood’s writings. Certain questions tormented her to the point of not letting her sleep. Coyote had told her he had seen a strange black cloud floating in the air near him when the explosion had destroyed the crypt. The phenomenon had disappeared almost as soon as he had seen it. Coyote’s description sounded like the “black cloud” Eliott had told her about, the one the paleographer’s translation mentioned in many passages in the book. Coyote had admitted that he had never understood how he had ended up more than five miles from the crypt. He had lost consciousness at the bottom of it. Could the black cloud have carried him from there? That was certainly the gut feeling he had always had. He had only confided this to Lauren because she had insisted that he tell her every detail he could remember. In her grief, Lauren clung to this mystery as her last hope. If that black cloud had really carried Coyote away to save him, it was because it was conscious. If that thing had saved Coyote from death, it could only have had something to do with Eliott or Matthew. Faced with the impossibility of answering these questions that tortured her, Lauren decided one day to close the book for good. She stored it in the attic in a wooden box she locked with a padlock. One spring day, she went to the lake in the forest a few miles from the farm, sat by the water, and threw the key as far as she could. Tears flowed from her eyes, which were as green as the lake water in the sunlight. She sat there motionless until sunset, in a meditation that intertwined regret and pain. All those questions she could never answer made her suffer too much. It was better like this.
The months passed, and the farm’s renovation was complete. The buildings had returned to their original condition. Lauren had perfectly respected the spirit of the settlers who had tamed the Wild West. She had left the rusty ironwork and old sheet metal as they were, and the rustic woodwork still held up well under a coat of stain. Lauren was proud of her work. Her mother often told her that “for a little-bitty woman,” she had done “a hell of a job.”
When the weather was nice, Lauren had taken up the habit of going swimming in the lake. That Sunday, the sun was shining. She made herself a lunch and jogged up the trail. When she arrived, she undressed completely and plunged into the cool water to swim to the other side and slowly return doing the breaststroke. When she got out of the water, she noticed a rustle nearby in the woods. She didn’t worry about it, thinking it was a deer coming to get a drink. She had her lunch in the shade of a spruce tree. When she returned to the farm, her mother was waiting for her on the wooden porch as usual, swaying in her rocking chair with a slight smile on her lips. But she wasn’t alone. A man was standing next to her, leaning against the window ledge in a position that seemed strangely familiar to her.
“Lauren, honey, you have a visitor. This very charming and polite young man says he is looking for work and that he…”
Lauren interrupted her. “Mom, maybe he’s civilized enough to introduce himself. Sir?”
The visitor came out of the porch’s shadows and walked toward Lauren, taking off his baseball cap to greet her. He was dressed in jeans and a plain white T-shirt. He was maybe twenty-five, max—tall, slender. His hair was dark, medium-length, and tousled. His skin was also very dark, as were his eyes. He was definitely not a local guy, Lauren thought to herself as she watched him approach.
“I heard you were going to expand your land.”
That voice.
“So I thought maybe you could use a guy to help you.”
Lauren approached him and saw his eyes up close. Her heart started pounding so hard in her chest that she felt short of breath.
He smiled and walked closer to her.
Those eyes.
Lauren smiled back at him and walked even closer.
“I feel like I know you; are you from around here?” she asked, hiding her emotion as well as she could.
“No, I’m from a little town far from here. Does St. Marys mean anything to you?”
They were only a couple of feet apart.
“Yes, that sounds familiar,” she replied, without taking her eyes off his.
He put his hand on her cheek to push back one of her curls, which had caught on the corner of her mouth. He whispered, “I think I know you too.”
Thank you to my friends and fellow authors, Denis, Helen, and Jacques, who encouraged me to undertake this translation, and to Beth and Lynn, the two ace translators who tackled it.
Thank you to all these writers of the past who are still an inexhaustible source of inspiration: Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, and H.G. Wells, to name a few. And those who still rock, including Stephen King, Dean R. Koontz, Graham Masterton, Neil Gaiman, and Clive Barker.
Very special thanks to the bloggers who read this first novel in its French edition and those who will read it in its US version. Hope you will enjoy it !
My next suspense/horror novel to come in 2020
“Deep down”
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[1] This serial killer’s specialty was using a meat grinder to hide his victims’ bodies in dog food cans.
[2] At the beginning of the twentieth century, a high-ranking Freemason named Karl Kellner founded the OTO and thus continued the tradition of Templar organizations. Kellner justified the choice of name by saying he had received oral instruction from two Arabs and a Hindu follower on the magic secrets that corresponded to his essence and the teachings of the ancient Templar organizations.
The Inquisition publicly burned the last known grand master of the Templars, Jacques de Molay (1293–1313). With the subsequent persecution of the Knights Templar, the Order, which had sought to merge the mysteries of East and West, disappeared from the public eye. It tried to continue the Templar tradition in various works, but their statements were contradictory.
After Kellner’s death in 1905, Theodor Reuss took over and formed the inner religious leadership with Franz Hartmann, Henry Klein, and John Yarker.
In public, they explained the nature of the new OTO only slightly in the journal Oriflamme, a publication of a Masonic lodge in 1912.
“Our Order has the key that opens all Masonic and hermetic secrets, namely, the doctrine of magic, and this teaching explains, without exception, all the secrets of Freemasonry and all religious systems.”
[3] “I come to you through the ways of the spirit.”
[4] The great creating spirit, the supreme divinity.
[5] Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC, is a time scale adopted as the basis of international civil time by most countries in the world.
The Essence of Darkness Page 37