by Sarah Langan
“I murdered my brother,” he said, and once he said it, he started crying. “I’m alone now. I have no one.”
The passenger side was dented, so she walked over to the driver’s side and opened the door. He scooted over. “I’m not old enough to drive,” he said.
She sat down. Then she reached over and turned off the radio, which had been set to static on high volume. Ahead of them were the woods, and then the highway. Behind them was Corpus Christi.
She was so quiet that he thought she might be a ghost. He wiped his eyes and looked at her. Please touch me, he wanted to say, but he was afraid.
She put her foot on the gas and they began to drive. He felt her eyes on him. Hard things, without much compassion. But thank God they were blue. “We’ll take care of each other,” she said.
He was so grateful that he was struck mute.
Together they drove to the highway ramp in Bedford, which the border guards had abandoned. When they hit New Hampshire, they saw the stopped traffic and empty cars, so they pulled onto the shoulder, and off-roaded through small towns until they picked up Route 88, and headed west. By luck or divinity, they drove through the day, and long into the night, and no one stopped them.
EPILOGUE
It’s been two months now, and I wait for news. The streets are empty during the day, save for Tim Carroll, who has gone mad, and still wanders Corpus Christi, searching for all those who have gone missing.
My candles are almost run out. I’ve had time to think about the week that ended the world. More time than anyone should. I miss my husband. I miss my daughter, too. My leg is nearly healed, but the bone knit wrong, and I walk with a limp. To keep the savages from devouring his remains, I stored my husband in the cold cellar. It awaits a proper funeral.
I’ve got a radio that receives frequencies from all over the country, and there are still some cities standing in the Midwest. But with this leg I am trapped. There is no food left, not even sacks of flour or sugar on the shelves of grocery stores. I’ve bound all the second-story windows with wooden planks. At night I hear them, but they never come in. The ones who survived the change don’t look human anymore. Perhaps Maddie is protecting me. She does not travel with the rest at night, and I often see her alone, at the door. I want to let her in.
I think about Canada. This virus can’t last forever. But there is David in California, and I imagine that he is driving cross-country to find us. He is on his way home. I wait for him.
Brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers. We lose more with each passing day. It cannot last forever. This thing that has plagued this country, this bloody civil war, must end.
But for now I wait, and light my candles, and use the days to scavenge food. I am so hungry that my fingernails are full of holes, and my hair is falling out. My husband’s body is preserved in the cellar. I think about that, too.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my agents, Joe Veltre and Sarah Self. For their unflagging support they deserve medals. Thanks also to my editors, Sarah Durand and Piers Blofeld, for their advice, honesty, and, ahem, patience. Thanks, finally, to Pam Spengler-Jaffee, for her diligence.
I’m indebted (probably literally) to the folks at the NYU Environmental Health Science Program, particularly Becky Gluskin for her good cheer, Judy Zelikoff for her Organ System Toxicology class, George Thurston, whose weather class inspired Maddie, and Gerry Solomon for letting me into his program.
Thanks also to my writing group Who Wants Cake and its members: Dan Braum, K. Z. Perry, Stefan Petruca, Lee Thomas, and the captain, Nicholas Kaufmann. For their generosity, I’m also grateful to Ramsey Campbell, Ray Garton, Jack Ketchum, Tim Lebbon, Kelly Link, Peter Straub, and Douglas E. Winter.
Finally, a few people who’ve been there along the way: Milda Devoe, Jon Evans, Michelle and Erik Gustavson, Marybeth Brennan Magee and her family, Brennans and Magees, alike, Debbie Marcus, Laura and James Masterson, Marianna McGillicuddy, Kate Quinn, my personal hero Artie Schupbach, Lori and Ryan Stattenfield, Arlaina Tibensky, J. T. Petty, Mom and Dad, who let me use their house as a writing colony, Chris, Michael, and the Virginia, Massachusetts, D.C., Syracuse, and Amityville Langans. I’m very grateful that none of you requested, upon reading my work, that I go to a shrink. Please refrain from doing so at Thanksgiving.
About the Author
SARAH LANGAN received her MFA in fiction writing from Columbia University. She studied with Michael Cunningham, Nicholas Christopher, Helen Schulman, Susan Kenney, and Maureen Howard, among others, all of whom have been instrumental to her work. The author of The Keeper, she is currently at work on her third novel and is a master’s candidate in environmental medicine at NYU. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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Resounding acclaim for SARAH LANGAN’s chilling and extraordinary debut novel THE KEEPER
“A beautiful, suspenseful novel…that sets out to do exactly what it should: scare the reader with a combination of well-crafted prose and page-turning velocity.”
Baltimore Sun
“Sarah Langan’s debut novel THE KEEPER kept me up, late into the night…I’m hoping for a whole shelf of novels by Langan, and many other sleepless nights.”
Kelly Link, author of Magic for Beginners
“Deft and disturbing, THE KEEPER twists expectations into surreal surprises. Sarah Langan’s tale of haunted lives and landscapes is hypnotic reading.”
Douglas E. Winter
“Richly populated with small-town characters at varying stages of emotional crisis, from numb puzzlement to unshakable bitterness to abject despair…it’s the only horror story I’ve read recently that finds adequate metaphors for the self-destructive properties of anger.”
New York Times Book Review
“Her book [has] a distinct and juicy flavor all its own. THE KEEPER begins what should be a very fruitful career.”
Peter Straub, New York Times bestselling author of In the Night Room
“Splendid…Echoes of Stephen King resound throughout Ms. Langan’s rich depiction of a mill town…The first fruits of a most promising career.”
Washington Times
“A smart, brand-new take on the haunted house story and it’s a dilly—crammed with startling images and framed by a sense of overwhelming dread. It’s really hard to believe this is a first novel.”
Jack Ketchum, author of Offspring
“Its brooding atmosphere comes as much from the social and psychological as from the ghostly, and, best of all, from the quality of the prose.”
Ramsey Campbell, author of Secret Story
“The new author on the block is definitely a keeper.”
Locus
“THE KEEPER is a brilliant debut…This disturbing, spooky novel is written by someone who knows about dread, and imagery, and fear, and who knows that a good ghost story needs soul.”
Tim Lebbon, author of Dusk
“An astonishing first novel that had me turning pages late into the night. The book is chilling, haunting, and so smartly written that the pages fly by like the wind. Do not read this book while you’re alone—unless you turn on all the lights.”
Ray Garton, author of The Loveliest Dead
“Langan’s characters come brilliantly to life…This is horror on a big scale, akin to the more ambitious work of Stephen King…This effective debut promises great things to come.”
Publishers Weekly
“[THE KEEPER] will scare the heck out of you.” OK! Magazine (****)
Books by Sarah Langan
THE MISSING
THE KEEPER
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE MISSING. Copyright © 2007 by Sarah Langan. All rights reserved under International
and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Microsoft Reader August 2007 ISBN 978-0-06-153621-2
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