Mantle of Darkness is now available in paperback, ebook, and Kindle formats!

My novel, Mantle of Darkness, is now available in paperback and Kindle formats from Amazon.com, as well as ebook from Lulu.com.  Coming soon to Barnes and Noble.

Here is chapter 1 of my new novel, Mantle of Darkness!

CHAPTER 1

 

The man knelt beside the campfire.  He was cold.  It was just past seven in the morning in early May.  He was in the West Virginia woods, but he was no woodsman.  In fact, he didn’t have much knowledge of the woods at all.  If not for the Zippo lighter that he had taken from the old couple at the farm, he would have no fire.  As it was, it was a poor excuse for a fire, more smoke than flames, though he welcomed any warmth at all.  He looked up at the sunlight as it stabbed its way through the trees, washing everything in brilliant white-yellow light and deep black silhouettes.  He sighed and let himself fall backwards.  He felt the wet ground beneath him, but it didn’t matter. 

He thought about his situation and how hopeless it now seemed.  He wasn’t sure what he was going to do.  He didn’t like the way things were.  He didn’t like being tired, cold, and wet.  He thought that maybe he should have stayed at the farmhouse, the house that had belonged to the old couple.  What had been their name?  The Smiths, he was nearly certain.  Their house was warm and there had been plenty to eat.  He’d felt home, almost welcome, but he had been afraid to stay there for long.  The Smiths were dead and he couldn’t risk lingering there.  The Smiths were dead because he had killed them two days prior. 

The man who sat on the wet ground in the middle of the woods of West Virginia was Dwight Fuller.  He was a killer.  It wasn’t just the Smiths.  They had been a necessity.  He had not had much choice in the matter of killing them, not after they realized who he was.  Dwight Fuller was an evil man.  He was evil to the core of himself.  He had no redeeming qualities, nor justifications.  He was on the run from the West Virginia State police as well as the FBI.  Dwight Fuller was a confessed and convicted murderer of children.  He didn’t just murder them.  He tortured them.  He beat them, burned them, dismembered and disfigured them.  He loved to hear them beg and scream.  What he loved more than anything was their innocence and the way he felt as if he could take it from them.  He had killed people before, adults, but it was of little enjoyment to him, and it hadn’t been for some time.  He grew tired of the same begging for their lives or last resort threats of violence if he didn’t let them go.  He had heard every connection to dangerous and influential people that his victims could imagine.  Some of those connections must have been real, he thought.  Most of them were surely imagined in a last attempt to save themselves. 

That’s what he deeply loved about the children, about taking their lives.  They didn’t beg to be spared, they didn’t threaten or ask why this was happening to them.  They begged for their mommy and daddy.  They begged for them to come and save them from this pain and to take them to a safe place.  They begged for the innocence that he had taken.  After he had beaten and tortured enough, heard the awful pleas and felt the last drop of beautiful innocence leave them, he would kill them.  He buried their small bodies in remote places where no one would find them.  Places that would not betray his sickness or reveal his methods to eager police detectives looking to make a name for themselves.   He buried their bodies in graves he dug himself.  Shallow for the sake of speed, but somehow deep with the despair of their families, who would never again find peace or real happiness.  The kind of happiness that a person can only find through their children.  Dwight replaced that with the kind of despair that could only be felt through their loss.  He was a monster. 

Eventually, Dwight Fuller was caught.  As it happened, one of the shallow graves did relinquish its secrets.  Once the grave was found, it was easy for the police to build a case.  Dwight’s weakness was his arrogance.  He had been sure that no one would ever find his impromptu burial sites.  He was so sure of it that he’d made little effort to conceal any physical evidence present on his victims. 

There had been a trial full of grisly details and tears.  In the end, he had taken the DA’s deal to reveal the graves of his remaining victims in exchange for spending the rest of his life in prison.  There was no possibility of parole.  He preferred such a fate to a sentence of death because he was a coward and he feared death.  Over the course of several months, Dwight led police officers to each of the children’s graves.  There were seventeen small graves in all.  It was a relatively small number when associated with any other event or situation.  But seventeen murdered children, seventeen families destroyed, seventeen holes in the fabric of the universe that could never again be filled, it was shocking in its enormity. 

After the victims had all been revealed, Dwight was sent to spend the rest of his life in prison.  He’d prepared himself for an insular few decades, surrounded by bars and barbed wire.  But he was never to make it there.  The circumstances surrounding his escape had been strange, especially to Dwight himself. 

He wrapped his jacket tightly to his body as he remembered the events of that night, the night he had escaped.  It was four days ago, when the police transport truck had been winding along the interstate and something had happened.  He felt a percussive jerk as the truck seemed to strike something and began flipping off the road, down a steep embankment. 

Dwight couldn’t help the shudder of cold that ran up his spine.  He looked around as he remembered.  Even now, he felt icy tendrils of dread work their way up his back to the base of his neck. 

It had been past dusk on a freezing night.  He remembered one of the guards yelling that there was a bear in the road before he had felt the shock of hitting something massive.  What happened after that seemed to come to him quickly, but in an endless pool of time.  He remembered it in ripples that washed over him in a chaotic fashion.  He could recall the sensation of tumbling over repeatedly, combined with a strange kind of weightlessness.  There were screams of pain and then a growl… some sort of awful growl.  Or not a growl really.  It was like nothing he had ever heard before.  It sounded like a hundred voices screaming at once, each echoing itself.  He was shocked by how he found it unnatural and terrifying.  Dwight Fuller wasn’t used to being the one that was terrified. 

As the truck came to rest on its top, he remembered looking through the caged windows and seeing something looking back at him.  It wasn’t a bear.  What he saw had shifted his blood into ice.  He remembered his head started to spin and blackness closing in.  All was lost in that blackness but the face staring back at him.  Dwight had always known that he was a sinister man, he’d always been the one that caused fear.  He had thought that he had known what fear was after seeing it so many times in the eyes of his victims.  He thought that he knew that he was the paragon of evil.  Yet, as he blacked out and his vision narrowed on the face staring back at him, he knew that he was wrong.  He knew that he had seen the face of the devil.



My new novel, Mantle of Darkness, is available now on Kindle and ebook. Soon in paperback as well!

Mantle of Darkness, my new novel is just starting to release!  Check out the description below:

Deep in the woods of West Virginia lies a secret, old and terrible.  The residents of Nicholas County are disappearing.  A mysterious drifter, Jack Silver, was passing through the town of Grey Springs when he suddenly found himself caught up in a horror that he couldn’t escape.  Now, together with the sister of the latest man to vanish, he must uncover the chilling truth before all is lost to the darkness.

Mantle of Darkness is available now on  Lulu.com and Kindle in ebook format.  It will be available soon through Barnes and Noble in ebook format,  and in ebook and paperback through Amazon.com.  I can't wait to hear what you think!

Please follow my blog!