Douglas Preston - Crimson Shore

“I’m just making a point. This is like the fifth blackout this year. You’d think that you — of all people — would have a good supply of candles.”

“No one’s stopping you from buying candles when you’re in town — which you are every day.”

“I assumed you’d taken care of it. There’s this thing called a division of labor.”

“You never mentioned we were out of candles.”

“I did. You just forgot.” He threw himself down on the sofa in disgust. This was what their life was like, fighting every damn day over the stupidest of things. He wondered what he’d ever seen in this woman. They didn’t have kids. No reason they couldn’t end it now. But there were complications, financial entanglements...

The shutter slammed into the side of the house again, and a strong gust rattled the windows in their frames. The shutter slammed yet again, harder, and this time a windowpane broke with a tinkling of glass. A howl of wind came in, accompanied by a gust of rain, knocking over a photo frame standing on the sill.

“There!” Sarah cried triumphantly. “Now look at what’s happened!”

The wind gusted again, a splatter of raindrops spotting the table — and carried along with it the howl of an animal outside.

“What was that?” Mark asked.

Sarah stood where she was, not saying anything, straining to look into the darkness. “That was really close to the house.”

“Somebody’s stupid dog, left out in the rain.”

“It didn’t sound like a dog.”

“Of course it’s a dog. What else could it be?”

Another howl, this time from the darkness right before the window.

“Go take a look,” said Sarah.

He took the flashlight and went into the front hall, shining the light out through the door window.

“ Ahh! ” he screamed, falling back just as the door burst open with a crash. A dark shape out of a nightmare bounded in, cloaked in nothing but a vile stench. Lillie wildly flailed his arms in disbelief and terror, trying to fend the beast off, but with a terrible inchoate roar it swung two stringy arms around him, grasping his midriff with its clawed hands.

“No, no!” he screamed, trying to twist away as he felt the long, sharp nails digging into his gut.

“Stop it! No! ” He could vaguely hear his wife in the background, screaming.

A sudden popping sound, like fat being pulled off of meat, and the hands opened him up like drawing back a pair of curtains. All was dark, the flashlight was gone, and he was only able to feel — and what he felt was a blast of cold air inside his very body cavity that, for just a moment, overwhelmed even the sudden agony. He fell back with a scream of horror and pain beyond description, and even as he did he could feel something reaming him out from the inside, accompanied by the loud, wet, busy sound of chewing.

Constance Greene was soaked to the bone, her sodden dress clinging heavily to her body, the hem bedraggled with sand and mud. But she did not feel the cold: her homeless childhood on the docks of New York City seemed to have made her permanently immune to chill. The wind thrashed the salt grass and cattails, which swayed crazily as she pushed her way through, her low boots squishing along the marshy ground, the flashlight beam playing into the murk, illuminating the slashing drops of rain. She moved swiftly, her mind an angry, embarrassed, humiliated blank.

At first, her instinct had been simply to get away — get away before she did something so violent and permanent she would regret it forever. But as she ran from the Inn, south toward the dunes and the salt grass, the faintest of plans began to form.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, she knew that what she was doing wasn’t simply defying Pendergast, but was also irrational and perhaps dangerous. She didn’t care. She also knew that her guardian, for once, was wrong: there was something else going on in the town of Exmouth, something dark, strange, beyond ratiocination — and still unsolved. She knew more than he did about such documents as the Sutter manuscript; she knew there was often more to them than was commonly believed. Obscura Peregrinatione ad Littus (A Dark Pilgrimage to the Southern Shore): there was a mystery here still to be uncovered, and the answer to that mystery lay to the south, in the ruins of Oldham — she was sure of it. What that answer was she could not begin to guess. But she would prove to Pendergast that she was right. She would prove it — and then she would shut herself away in certain sub-basement chambers of the Riverside Drive mansion known only to her until she felt in the mood to see the sun again.

As the land rose, the salt grass gave way to scrub oaks and twisted Scotch pines. She had passed Skullcrusher Rocks and the hook of land beyond, crossed a mudflat and channel — it was low tide — and reached Crow Island, at the far edge of the wildlife refuge. The ocean lay eastward, to her left, beyond the long, narrow barrier island. She paused to listen, but the wind was so loud that she could not hear the surf. The only thing visible in the swirling blackness was the faint blinking of the Exmouth lighthouse behind her, the beam sweeping by every nine seconds. It was this light that she navigated by, the beacon showing her the way to Oldham.

The scrubby trees began to thin, and dunes anchored by dune grass made their appearance. Now she could finally hear the thundering of the unseen ocean — or rather feel it beneath her feet, the shaking of the ground caused by the huge Atlantic rollers pounding the beach. She angled across the island, once again checking her position with the lighthouse. The deserted town could be no more than another mile or two. She would be there very soon.

A good nor’easter didn’t frighten Bud Olsen. On the contrary, he liked it. It filled him with vigor. And it didn’t bother Aubrey, his golden retriever. After retiring from fishing ten years before, Olsen had moved into town and now lived in a small house at the end of Main Street, where he could walk everywhere — especially to his Tuesday lunch club and to the library, where he was a vigorous borrower of books, preferring the maritime adventure stories of Patrick O’Brian, John Masefield, and C. S. Forester.

At nine o’clock, with the wind rattling the casements, Aubrey began whining at the door and wagging his tail. Olsen laid aside his book and rose from the chair with a grunt. He turned off the kerosene lantern and walked to the door.

“You want to go out, boy?”

Aubrey wagged his tail more vigorously.

“Well then, let’s have ourselves a little walk.” More by feel than by sight, he donned his oilskin and sou’wester, pulled on a pair of boots, fished the flashlight out of the hall drawer, and snapped the leash on Aubrey. He pushed the door open against the wind, then walked down the porch stairs and out into the street. The town was mostly dark because of the blackout, but the police station at the far end of town was lit up by an emergency generator. The wind whipped across the water of the bay, the rain lashing almost horizontally. Bud lowered his head, the wind tugging at the sou’wester, which was securely tied around his chin.

They turned left and headed down Main Street toward the center of town. As they passed the various houses he could see the soft shadows, backlit in orange, of people moving about with candles or lanterns in hand, giving the town a cozy, old-fashioned, Currier and Ives sort of feeling. This was how it had been in Exmouth a hundred years ago, Bud thought, before electricity. It wasn’t so bad. Electricity had brought nothing but trouble, when you thought about it — glaring light, pollution, computers and iPads and all that nonsense that he saw every day, as everyone — and not just kids — walked around town staring like zombies into little bright rectangles instead of greeting one another, instead of smelling the salt air and observing the scarlet maples in their autumnal glory...