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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2019 Scott Thomas

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Inkshares, Inc., San Francisco, California

  www.inkshares.com

  Cover design by Lauren Harms

  Edited by Adam Gomolin

  Interior design by Kevin G. Summers

  ISBN: 9781947848368

  e-ISBN: 9781947848375

  LCCN: 2018943991

  First edition

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Kim

  For Aubrey and Cleo

  And for my dad

  PRAISE FOR KILL CREEK

  “A menacing and cinematic story that starts off merely creepy but evolves into a bloody, action-driven terrorfest [and] a thought-provoking and enjoyable look at the genre itself, as the characters discuss horror, its history, and its tropes at length. A match for readers who enjoyed Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “Intensely realized and beautifully orchestrated Gothic horror.”

  —Joyce Carol Oates

  “Not since I read The Shining in eighth grade has a book scared the crap out of me as much as Kill Creek. The combo of a great premise and an exquisite ability to conjure dread and terror make Scott Thomas’s debut the perfect Halloween treat.”

  —Andy Lewis, Hollywood Reporter

  “Kill Creek is the horror debut of 2017…. An intimate, twisted gothic testament to horror as a genre … Kill Creek is a book from a horror fan to horror fans—creepy, atmospheric, and messed up in all the best ways … a must-read for anyone who likes it when their fiction goes to dark places.”

  —Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog

  “Scott Thomas splendidly creates a fascinating co-dependency between the spooky edifice and the folk that perpetuate (and amplify) its morbid history. Thomas does a fine job with his characters, and the atmosphere is chock-full of delightfully unsettling images. Horror aficionados will welcome it with open arms.”

  —Scream magazine

  “Suspenseful, foreboding, and macabre, Kill Creek is high-grade horror, successfully bringing together old-world classics like The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, elements of the highly stylized Japanese scare movies like The Ring, and a bit of The Amityville Horror to give readers original twists and deathly scares.”

  —Fantasy-Faction

  “There’ll be no admonitions to read this one with the lights on or alone at night. That’s a given. Alone or with friends, lights blazing, or a single reading lamp casting shadows over the page, it won’t matter. The result will be the same: shivers for many nights afterward. Kill Creek is the perfect novel to read on Halloween.”

  —New York Journal of Books

  “Kill Creek is a slow-burn, skin-crawling haunted house novel with a terrifying premise and a shockingly brutal gut-punch of a conclusion. This debut establishes Scott Thomas as a force to be reckoned with on the horror scene. His remarkable ability to build tension and suspense had me on the edge of my seat until the last page.”

  —Shane D. Keene, HorrorTalk

  “Kill Creek delivers the cinematic scares of The Conjuring without losing a literary feel. This is the kind of book that reminds you binge-reading came way before binge-watching.”

  —Kailey Marsh, BloodList

  “Gives us just the right kinds of Halloween-spirit thrills while throwing in some new twists, and great characters.”

  —Horrible Imaginings podcast

  “I thought there were no more good haunted house stories to tell until I read Kill Creek. Scott Thomas uses a foundation of the expected tropes to build a story with not just a classic horror ambiance but also a unique architecture of tension.”

  —J-F. Dubeau, author of A God in the Shed

  “An exquisite horror tale … The story’s unique blend of literary horror and psychological thriller made it an addictive read.”

  —BiblioSanctum

  A group of best-selling horror writers team up for a publicity stunt at an infamous abandoned haunted house in the Kansas countryside, and guess what happens? Shit gets real!!! They end up awakening an entity that comes after them. That is creepy and crazy and it has a vibe like, hey, guys, you kind of had it coming. Oh, and it all goes down ON Halloween night. Yeah, this is an obvious All Hallows Read selection.”

  —Geeks of Doom

  Friendship is one mind in two bodies.

  —Mencius

  Sorrow’s child sits by the water

  Sorrow’s child your arms enfold her

  Sorrow’s child you’re loathe to befriend her

  Sorrow’s child but in sorrow surrender

  And just when it seems as though

  All your tears were at an end

  Sorrow’s child lifts up her hand

  And she brings it down again

  —Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, “Sorrow’s Child”

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE: UNDER THE RIVER

  PART ONE: THERE IS A LIGHT THAT NEVER GOES OUT

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  PART TWO: IN BETWEEN DAYS

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  PART THREE: BLACKBIRD

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  PART FOUR: MOTHERS OF THE DISAPPEARED

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  PART FIVE: THE KILLING MOON

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  EPILOGUE: INTO THE LIGHT OF THE DARK BLACK NIGHT

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INKSHARES

  PROLOGUE

  UNDER THE RIVER

  SHE KNEW ALMOST nothing about the history of the town.

  She did not know that once upon a time, the town was not a town at all but a wound in the gypsum hills overrun by Johnsongrass, musk thistle, and milkweed. In those days, the Verdigris River slithered like a brown, muddy snake through the lowlands, the curve of its back brushing up against the towering stalks of thick weeds. The Kiowa called this place p’oiye tsape t’on, meaning “hidden water,” because not a glint of sunlight on the surface of the river could be seen from the steep ridges overlooking the area. There was no rea
son to go down into the impenetrable brush. There were no animals worth hunting there, no vegetation worth picking.

  The town itself seemed to appear out of nowhere, a collection of small, one-room structures along a dirt road etched into the wild countryside. At one end of the basin, the gypsum hills parted like stone curtains, just enough to allow the road to enter. At the other end, the dirt path hugged closer to the river, following its curve around the bluffs. And then, suddenly, the path shot straight north as if startled out of the odd valleys, back into the vast Kansas prairie.

  She did not know that the town’s name, Pacington, was nothing more than a bastardization of the original words. But many had forgotten its origin. By the time the first shop owners opened their doors along Center Street, the Native Americans living in Southeast Kansas had long ago been “relocated” to Oklahoma. As more and more white settlers found their way between the river basin, fewer bothered to consider the people who had lived there before them. The untamed tangles of brush and vine along this section of the Verdigris belonged to the town of Pacington.

  She vaguely remembered the stories her father told her about the day the Army Corps of Engineers began construction on a reservoir just outside of town. Their intention was to control flooding to the farmland along the river, but on the second day, workers broke through into a chasm hidden beneath the river floor, unleashing a body of water buried eons ago by the shifting earth. It swirled up through the lazy current of the Verdigris and pushed its edges deep into the surrounding forest. In a matter of minutes, the river became a lake, the fleeing water moving too quickly for man or machine to escape. Two workers lost their lives that day. They were swept down into an ancient abyss, the depth of which easily swallowed fifty feet of a toppled crane. The equipment was recovered, but the bodies were not. Some said they just kept drifting down, down, deeper into the dark, endless waters of that underground lake, forever falling into the earth.

  Those unlucky enough to own property along Lower Basin Road were paid a reasonable sum by the government. The peak of one roof breaking the water’s surface was all that was left to remind them of what they had lost. A new site farther south, near the town of Oologah, Oklahoma, was chosen for the intended reservoir, and so the Army Corps of Engineers left behind an accidental body of water and more than a little of their pride.

  In a single day, Pacington was transformed from a river town to a lake town. For a while, the government’s blunder appeared to be a blessing in disguise. The water in what became known as “Lost Lake” was remarkably clear, a sliver of glass nestled between the red gypsum hills. The cool blue oasis was a summer destination for locals desperate to escape the sweltering heat of Southeast Kansas and Northeast Oklahoma. Pacington was a refuge.

  The contrast between the pristine appearance of the lake and the brownish-green waters of the Verdigris River that fed into and from it were striking. The explanation was fairly mundane: the floor of the lake was essentially a crater in the earth, composed of the lighter solid granite than existed beneath the muddy bed of the rest of the Verdigris. That did not stop some from viewing Lost Lake as a natural—or in some cases, supernatural—wonder.

  She had first glimpsed the sparkling ripples playing across the lake’s surface when she was four years old. That was in 1982, and the town had been a quaint lakeside resort for over two decades. That was the Pacington she remembered. That was the place where mornings were for sleeping in late, where afternoons were filled with hiking and fishing and rowing, where evenings were painted pink by brilliant sunsets above the hills as her father grilled largemouth bass over a smoldering mound of charcoal. She could smell the life of the forest on the air and stare into an infinite field of diamond-like stars at night. She could imagine anything in the Pacington of her memories, for it was a land where lakes could spring from the ground without warning. It was a place of creation.

  Yet there was much she did not know. She did not know that, in this place of beauty, something dark and malicious was mutating beneath her mother’s sun-kissed skin. She did not know that her parents had been aware of it since she was three, or that it was the reason her father had bought the summerhouse on the shore of Lost Lake. She did not know that every summer, her mother was getting sicker, that every day they spent was not the beginning of their life together but the end. She did not know that, after she went to bed, her parents cried and held each other, that they tiptoed out of the lake house one night to make love on the shore.

  She did not know of the unspeakable things that came after she left—the shadow that fell over Pacington, the pain and fear that twisted through the town like a barbed, poisonous vine.

  Perhaps it was for the best. Sometimes it is easier to not know. Life is happier lived in ignorance.

  But that does not mean the unspeakable things are not there. They are simply hidden, like water beneath the ground, searching for a way to flow into the light.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE ROAD SLICED a gray line through the black night. Beyond the beams of her headlights, the land was at the mercy of the moonlight. She imagined the road ending without warning, driving over the edge, plummeting into an infinite nothingness, until her screams became a song for the darkness.

  It was silly to think such things, but the threads of her life, the loose pieces she had tried for so long to keep in place, had finally unraveled. And so she drove, her eyes on the farthest edge of the headlights’ reach, staring at that line where vision failed and the world became shadow.

  Kris Barlow glanced at herself in the rearview mirror and saw a stranger staring back at her. The soft glow of the dashboard deepened the hint of crow’s feet that stretched from the corners of her eyes. Her porcelain skin attempted to peek through large clusters of freckles. She wished her mother had forced her to wear sunscreen when she was little, as Kris did religiously with her own daughter. But that was a different time, before words like “SPF” and “reapply” were drilled into the vocabulary of children. She recalled the odd satisfaction of slowly peeling away thin layers of dead, translucent skin, trying to keep a large section intact. Once, she managed to remove a patch as large as the palm of her hand. She placed it carefully over her right cheek and admired herself in the bathroom mirror, feeling like a lizard as the edges of the old pulled back to reveal the new.

  Kris stared at her face in the rearview mirror. When had she become this person? If the measure of her lifespan were her father, who passed away at eighty-two, then she had officially reached the midpoint. If it were her mother, Kris was knock-knock-knockin’ on heaven’s door.

  In the back seat, something shifted.

  Kris adjusted the rearview mirror until she could see the pale form of Sadie leaning against the side window. The seat belt held her upright, her head hanging limply, chin against her chest. Spirals of red hair twisted down around her sleeping eyes. An iPad and a notebook lay on the seat next to her, both untouched since they’d hit the road.

  That was me, a thousand years ago. Kris could still picture her father driving, his hands obediently at ten and two, and her mother reading by the soft glow of a penlight.

  Back then, they’d always waited until her father was done with work before hitting the road. It was less than a two-hour drive, so leaving their home in Blantonville at seven or eight in the evening did not seem like such a big deal. They would hear his key in the lock, and Krissy would leap up from the beanbag chair in front of the living room television and race to throw her arms around his waist. It was Daddy, still in his work clothes, the perfect pleats of his slacks, the smooth brown leather of his belt, the stiff, starched shirt and wide, striped tie. As a child, Kris grappled to understand exactly what her father did for a living.

  “I sell insurance,” he had told her on more than one occasion. “It’s like the promise that someone will be there if things go wrong.”

  Now she knew the truth. Insurance meant hours of phone calls and stacks of paperwork. It meant dealing with a company that sear
ched for any conceivable loophole to get out of paying what they had promised. It meant waiting months, sometimes even years, before the check arrived, if it ever did.

  Kris knew the people who were there in an instant when things went wrong, and the insurance company was not one of them.

  Not that she had wanted anyone there. Not the neighbors who arrived on her doorstep with still-warm casserole dishes in their hands, as if potatoes covered in cheese and corn flakes could resurrect a loved one. Not the parents from Sadie’s school, who secretly hoped for the destruction of others’ happiness to prove that their own miserable existences were not as bad as they feared. Not the relatives who’d never thought she was good enough in the first place, the ones who’d placed him on that pedestal and convinced her that she had to rise up to his level.

  They had not seen what she had seen. None of them were there when the police called in the middle of the night. They did not know the ice-cold panic of realizing your entire life had just been shattered into a million jagged pieces by the ring of a cell phone.

  She knew. She knew the uncanny artificiality as she arrived at the Lake County Coroner’s Office in downtown Black Ridge, Colorado. The reception area could have been the front desk of any small-town motel. A fake plastic plant, its warped green leaves covered in dust, stood in the corner beside an oddly placed wooden chair, white stuffing peeking out at the seat cushion’s edge. A random collection of fashion and outdoor magazines lay spread across a glass coffee table, as if anyone there to identify a body would want to first flip through a six-month-old issue of Guns & Ammo. The beige walls of the room did not appear to have been painted that color; rather, the original white had curdled over the years, aged by the medicinal stench of embalming chemicals and the dread of those who walked through the front door.

  This is a waiting room, she thought. This is purgatory.

  No one had been there to greet her. Not the officer who had woken her at three in the morning, when Jonah should have been home, snoring beside her. Not whoever had left the front door unlocked in anticipation of her arrival. She was welcomed only by the soft rattle of a loose air-conditioning vent and the noxious aroma of chemicals and raw meat seeping in from another room.