The Waiting: A Supernatural Thriller
Hart, Joe
Prologue
It’s coming.
The words chanted inside his head as he ran, his arthritic joints exploding with each painful step. Blood dripped from his fingertips, smeared on the screen door as he pushed through it into the warm night air. Stars hung above the lake, their cascade of pinpricks joined to one another like a dot-to-dot in the sky, their portrait reflected in the calm face of water beyond the shore. A soft breeze spoke in the pines and nudged Maggie’s chime into life. The jangle of the hollow steel spurred him on as his lungs began to burn.
He felt a twinge in his shoulder, and it lanced down the inside of his biceps and stabbed a shot of fire into the left side of his chest. Heart attack, finally. He knew it would take him one day, just like it took his grandfather, father, and son. He welcomed it, hoped it would drop him on the dewy grass. But the pain relented and vanished, a phantom of the nerves that came and went with his age.
He ran.
His socks were already soaked when he hit the water, but the chill that set into the lake each night still made him grimace. What did he care now, with Maggie gone? His insides shrunk with the renewed epiphany: he would never see his wife again. Unless ...
He stopped in the waist-deep water, the liquid darkness rippling with his movements. Tears rolled down his face, catching in the lines of his years. His family flitted through his mind’s eye—births, graduations, anniversaries.
His reverie was broken by a splash behind him, like something diving into the lake. His eyes widened as he craned his neck around, looking for movement but knowing it didn’t matter. He was done.
Curiosity killed the cat, and nothing in the world can bring him back.
He cried, tears dropping from his face like the blood from his fingers. Knowing it was his fault would be the last thought he would take with him.
He doubled over, his face inches from the water, and saw his blackened reflection. He was only shadow, an outline. Nothing more. He took a last breath, savoring the sweet taste of it on his tongue before exhaling as much as he could; he would need a lungful to do it right.
He made to push his face into the water, but two hands shot up from the depths, their fingers fish-belly white, and found the back of his neck.
A garbled scream of pure terror fell from his mouth and was cut off the moment his head slammed into the lake. His feet surfaced, two pale, thrashing things as he kicked, and then they were gone as well.
Concentric waves rolled away in ever-increasing circles, and soon they flattened, leaving the water unbroken and smooth like the silence of the night.
1
“Evan, we’re going to have to let you go.”
Evan Tormer raised his face from his hand and let the words reverberate inside him. He stared across the corner office, the office that should have been his, at Christy Weathers sitting behind the desk. Her hair perched in a gravity-defying jumble of curls on top of her head, her mascaraed eyes watching him, cold, unblinking.
“Christy, look, we can talk about this, please.”
The man leaning against a desk near the panoramic window made a sound like a cough that could’ve been a laugh. Evan glared at him. Calling him a man was pushing it. Colt was a kid, at least seven years his junior. Evan took in his trendily hipster clothes—the too tight slacks, the vibrant clashing dress shirt, the oversized black-framed glasses—along with the sneering mouth beneath a poor attempt at a mustache.
“I’m sorry, Evan, there’s no wiggle room here, and you know it. Mr. Tillins is already aware of this, and the best I’ve been able to do is convince him not to press charges,” Christy said.
Evan swallowed. His throat was as dry as a streambed in a drought. Tears stung his eyes, and he forced them back down. He would not cry in front of these people.
“I paid everything back, every cent.” He searched Christy’s face for a semblance of compassion, a smile, something of the person he had worked with for four years before her promotion.
When she didn’t move a muscle, he continued: “Look, I was desperate, Elle was so sick and the treatments were more than we could handle.”
“Nontraditional treatments, is what I heard,” Colt said, taking his glasses off to polish them while gazing out at the afternoon sweep of Minneapolis.
Evan stared at the younger man until Colt returned his gaze. “What does that have to do with anything?” A cold flame lit in the bottom of his stomach.
Christy waved the question away like a buzzing fly. “Listen, Evan, I don’t want this any more than you do, you’re a vital part of the company. You do good work, you’re a team player, and your recent setbacks—”
“My wife died, that’s not really what I’d call a setback,” Evan said.
The tears were back, and they weren’t heeding his efforts. One slipped over the rim of his eyelid and traced down his cheek to his chin. Christy stiffened, her jaw tightening.
“Evan, we’re all very sorry about Elle, but the fact is, you took fifty thousand dollars from the company, and that can’t be overlooked.”
Christy paused and tipped her head to one side, a bundle of curls catching light from the setting sun. Evan wanted to tell her that her hair looked nice. In fact, he wanted to say he remembered the first time he saw her wear it like that, at the company Christmas party a year ago. He could still see that mop of blond curls bobbing at Tillins’s crotch while the man reclined in his office chair, oblivious to Evan retreating, the page of marketing reports still in his hand, and closing the CEO’s door without a sound.
Instead, he prepared to beg. “Christy, please, I won’t be able to afford Shaun’s medical bills without the health care.”