Oasis Read online

  OASIS

  By Brian Hodge

  A Macabre Ink Production

  Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Copyright 2013 / Brian Hodge

  Cover Design by James Powell

  LICENSE NOTES

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  Meet the Author

  Called “a spectacularly unflinching writer” by Peter Straub, Brian Hodge is the award-winning author of ten novels of horror and crime/noir, over 100 short stories, novelettes, and novellas, and four full-length collections. His most recent collection, Picking The Bones, from 2011, became the first of his books to be honored with a Publishers Weekly starred review. His first collection, The Convulsion Factory, was ranked by critic Stanley Wiater as one of the 113 best books of modern horror.

  Recent and upcoming works include a lengthy novella, Without Purpose, Without Pity; a collection of crime fiction, No Law Left Unbroken; and an updated hardcover edition of his early post-apocalyptic epic, Dark Advent.

  He lives in Colorado, where he’s currently engaged in a locked-cage death match with his next novel and other projects. He also dabbles in music, sound design, and photography; loves everything about organic gardening except the thieving squirrels; and trains in Krav Maga and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, which are of no use at all against the squirrels.

  Connect with Brian online through his web site (www.brianhodge.net), his blog (www.warriorpoetblog.com), or on Facebook (www.facebook.com/brianhodgewriter).

  Book List

  Novels

  Dark Advent

  Deathgrip

  Mad Dogs

  Nightlife

  Oasis

  Prototype

  The Darker Saints

  Wild Horses

  World of Hurt

  Collections

  Falling Idols

  Lies & Ugliness

  Picking the Bones

  The Convulsion Factory

  http://www.brianhodge.net

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  CONTENTS

  OASIS

  A Preview of FALLING IDOLS

  A Preview of NIGHTLIFE

  OASIS

  To my parents…

  for the love,

  for the support,

  and especially for

  the leftovers

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Although my novel Dark Advent hit the shelves first, Oasis was the first one written and sold; but stranger things have happened. Most first novels are the deskbound equivalent of struggling through a triathlon, and I’d like to thank everyone who made this one a little less grueling.

  Many thanks to my first agent, Victoria Pryor, who kept the faith, and to my current agent, Adele Leone, for helping me switch horses in midstream. Also to my editor, Melissa Ann Singer, for many wonderfully astute suggestions.

  Appreciation also goes out to Pamela Painter and the New England Writers Conference, for not only giving me the guts to take the plunge, but helping me find the deep end in the first place; David B. Silva and The Horror Show magazine; Robert R. McCammon; Doli Nickel; Fran Giamanco; and Keith and Jeannie Backes.

  Special thanks go to Gerald, Kevin, Clifford, Richard, Keith (again), Susan, Mary, and Leslie for making my teenage years the stuff of nostalgia. Old carolboys never die … they just sober up.

  I know that I hung

  On the windswept tree

  For nine whole nights,

  Pierced by the spear

  And given to Odin—

  Myself given to myself

  On that tree

  Whose roots

  No one knows.

  They gave me not bread

  Nor drink from the horn;

  Into the depths I peered,

  I grasped the runes,

  Screaming I grasped them,

  And then fell back.

  —From the Havamâl, ninth-century compilation of Icelandic poetry

  PROLOGUE

  Monday, November 25, 1940

  He’d found the stone three days ago, and instinctively he knew that things would never be quite the same again.

  Joshua Crighton was a historian, or at the age of twenty-two was at least trying to be, but he was certainly no archaeologist. Even so, it didn’t take a Ph.D. to know that he’d stumbled across something very peculiar.

  He was halfway through researching his Master’s thesis, a paper entitled Bloody Williamson: A Case Study in American Violence. He’d interviewed coal miners, judges, labor leaders, lawmen, bootleggers, gangsters, Klansmen … nearly every manner of individual who’d had a hand in making the Southern Illinois Williamson County one of the most violent spots in America during the first third of the century.

  And yet for three days nothing else had captured his attention and imagination like that stone.

  Joshua was spending the semester with his sister-in-law Doris and his two nieces. Doris had been widowed since last spring when his brother had put down one too many whiskeys, they’d guessed, and had steered his car into a lamp pole. For once, Joshua had mourned the fact that he himself had been the only one to inherit much common sense from levelheaded parents. As well, the past seven years, the duration of his brother Martin’s marriage to Doris, had seen far too little contact between him and Joshua. They’d been doing well to get together once a year, usually at Christmas. Once he was out of school, Joshua had thought, then they could start rebuilding those bridges.

  Now it looked as if they’d both run out of time. Were any regrets worse than opportunities lost forever?

  Martin had died in March. The kids seemed to handle it best, as kids often do. They were ever adaptable, but they weren’t quite old enough to comprehend just how final forever was. In a way, Joshua envied them that.

  He and Doris had spent a lot of time consoling one another back in March, and the following months had seen her overcome most of the grief … but not the loneliness that had enveloped the house like a shroud. When her invitation came to join them for a while, to live closer to the region he was studying, he didn’t think twice. He’d felt genuinely welcomed from the very outset, part of things, part of this family.

  He’d never truly considered Doris a sister until now. The benefits ran a two-way street. She seemed grateful for a sy
mpathetic pair of adult ears, and he, in a sense, felt as if he were posthumously making up for lost time with Martin. Better late than never.

  They lived seven miles north of the nearest town, a quiet little burg named Mt. Vernon, a far cry from the urban bustle he was used to in St. Louis. Mt. Vernon was over thirty miles from the Williamson County Line, so Joshua put in a lot of commuting time. The house itself was a rental, certainly cheap enough, with the nearest neighbor better than a half-mile distant. Martin had once told him that the owner was a carpenter who’d wanted to build several houses out here for his large family, but had suffered a stroke just after completing the first one. He’d rent it out for a pittance rather than sell it, the stubborn old bastard.

  For an office, Joshua was relegated to a small desk in the attic, a crude and unfinished room with scarcely enough space to stand upright without smacking his skull. The attic wasn’t wired for electricity, and so he worked at night by the light of a kerosene lantern. Hell on the eyes at times, but it managed to cast a warm homey glow over the room.

  On the third night after finding the stone, Joshua scraped his chair across the wooden floor, away from the desk. His muscles painfully unknotted as he stood.

  Five hours, no breaks. And what have I accomplished? Not a thing. He moved over to a window that looked out over the sharply sloping roof and beyond. A steady, chilly rain pelted away outside.

  Beyond…

  Toward the grove of trees the house was built into, a miniature forest that seemed to blot out every bit of light during the day to create a perpetual gloom. The grove gave his nieces endless diversions: One day it was an enchanted forest, replete with dragons and fairies and charming princes who were bound to show up sooner or later. The next day it would be chock-full of Injuns on the warpath, and the day after it became darkest Africa, lions and tigers behind every tree. Sarah and Maggie were five and six; give them a setting and their imaginations took over from there.

  Yet for some reason, and he knew this was totally unfounded, Joshua didn’t like that grove. As he stood watching it from the attic window, it felt as if they were two adversaries in an undeclared war. He could easily make out the largest tree on the far side of the grove, gleaming wetly black in the flashes of lightning, a monolithic beast spreading wide an infinity of arms, watching back. No matter what side you approached that tree from, it always seemed to be leaning toward you. What secrets was it hiding … guarding?

  He remembered how early last week the girls had come to him, bundled into sweaters and caps, excitement ablaze in their eyes.

  “And just what do you two want?” Joshua had deadpanned.

  “We need you to help us outside,” Sarah said.

  “Just what is so big you can’t do it by yourselves?”

  “We’re gonna dig a hole to China!” Maggie cried, jumping up and down and rattling Doris’s crystalware in the hutch.

  At first he was against the idea, he had work to do, but a persistent litany of please please please wore him down. Doris was off at work at the telephone company and wasn’t around to veto the mission, and since all work and no play made Josh a dull boy, off they went. Joshua grabbed a shovel outside and the girls brandished old tablespoons from the pantry. Sarah and Maggie chose a small oblong hillock within the grove as their digging site, cheering as Joshua mounted it and broke ground. Once he’d taken the firewood axe and hacked through some tree roots, they were well on their way.

  They would tire of the game soon. Sure.

  And so he thought each afternoon following their noisy departure from the school bus, when all thesis work came to a grinding halt and he slogged back to the ever-widening hole and didn’t have the heart to throw in the towel as the girls grinned at him while loosening dirt along the sides by scraping it with the tablespoons. Finally, on Friday, at a depth of better than four feet, Joshua’s shovel chinked against solid rock. A tense hush fell over the girls. Joshua scraped away loose dirt and found the object to be a broad, flat stone.

  Maggie leapt into the hole next to him, stamped her foot a couple times, then looked up at him with a triumphant grin. “We’re heeere!”

  Whooping, they ran off to celebrate, while Joshua sweated out another forty-five minutes to yank the stone free of the clay it was mired in. He stared at it, intrigued. Even through the mud and clay, he could see that it was almost perfectly rectangular, too much so to be by chance. About a foot wide, maybe eighteen inches long, four inches thick. He hauled it behind the house and cleared away the mud.

  Slowly, teasingly, the shapes carved into one side took on definite form. He saw an unmistakable organization to them; they circled the outer edge of the side like the whitewall of a tire. It looked like a primitive alphabet of some kind … crude sticklike figures, simple geometric shapes. It pained him to think he might’ve blundered onto the remnants of some long-dead culture and wrecked something already. He knew a couple of professors from Washington University in St. Louis who would no doubt be interested in coming over for a look, but he doubted it would end there. And the last thing he needed was an entourage turning their secluded home into an archaeological dig and playing havoc with the peaceful course life had been taking lately. Maybe he could find something on his own if he went slower, more carefully.

  It didn’t take long for Sarah and Maggie to realize they’d yet to see a real Chinaman, but after Saturday, Sarah wasn’t too crazy about going back into the grove at all. No amount of reason would dissuade her from the idea that she’d seen a big, smelly bear. Just as well. Joshua didn’t want them interfering at this point.

  Yesterday, Sunday, he’d found traces of rotten wood, spongy and crumbling away to soft splinters. Today there turned up a solid white substance, firmer than the wood, though still fragile. Bone? He couldn’t tell. But mixed in were three small chips that looked like nothing quite so much as human teeth...

  …and Joshua stared out at the rain-slick trees. A nightbreeze stirred the grove, and the trees swayed gently to its caress.

  A faint cry from downstairs. He cocked his head and listened.

  Probably Sarah. For the past couple nights, the bear from the grove had moved inside. She’d cry out as it crouched in her closet or corner, a beast that only a child could see. But … this hadn’t sounded quite like one of her bear cries.

  Something else struck him as peculiar. When Sarah’s bear made its nocturnal visits, her cries would soon be followed by the soothing sound of Doris’s voice, banishing the animal and lulling her to sleep. There had been none of that this time.

  Slowly, quietly, Joshua moved down the claustrophobic stairway into the hall just off the living room. Except for Eric Sevareid’s voice on the radio, the house was silent. The air down here was still warm and pleasant with the aroma of tonight’s pot roast.

  You threw it all away, didn’t you Martin?

  “Doris?”

  The steady patter of rain, the distant rolling of thunder…

  “Doris?”

  …and his own footsteps, suddenly unnaturally loud in a house that was rarely still.

  Joshua noticed that the girls’ door was closed. Odd. They always preferred it open a crack so a little light could seep in while they fell asleep. He took a step toward the door, then another.

  The thing that came charging out of the darkness of the other bedroom couldn’t have been Doris. It wore her clothes, it wore her face, but a moment later he saw that it couldn’t wear her eyes. A feral gleam shone deep within. Wet blond hair flew in disarray as she swung something forward out of the shadows. The blade of the firewood axe chunked deeply into the wall, shearing through wallpaper and showering plaster dust to the floor. She yanked it back out with frightening ease.

  Joshua staggered a step backward, abandoned by thought and voice alike. He could only gesture wildly, pleadingly. When her second swing grazed the back of his hand and drew blood, he jerked his hands back and made for the nearest exit … and found himself spiraling up into the attic once again.

/>   Doris lunged after him, the axe caving in a stair a second after his foot had left it. He no longer had to face those eyes, but he couldn’t shut out that voice — thick, angry, barely coherent. Angry? Furious. The voice was worse by far.

  Joshua slammed the attic door shut and threw the skinny deadbolt home. It latched with a false sense of security, allowing him only a breath or two to calm himself before she began battering away at the other side. He watched as the blade chewed larger and larger chunks from the door, hearing them peel away each time the blade was retracted for another swing.

  He backed away in search of a weapon. Boxes of junk towered to the low ceiling, festooned with cobwebs. There were odd relics of furniture and playthings the girls had outgrown or broken, a group of Martin’s belongings that had taken up too much room downstairs but which Doris had been so far unwilling to get rid of.

  The axe head was coming all the way through now.

  Joshua grabbed a box and upended it, spilling headless dolls and incomplete puzzles to the floor. He scooped papers and notes from his desk with a single bulldozing sweep of his arm, dumping them into the box. Crimping the top shut to protect against the rain, he moved over to the window and shoved it open, a gust of wind blowing in a sheet of rain. The storm outside had gained momentum. It was now a rain that drenched you to your skin, with its sights set on your bones.

  He kicked one leg out over the windowsill, foot scrabbling for a hold on the slick roof. He swung his other leg out, ducked the window, and crouched on the roof as raindrops needled his face and eyes. The attic door cleaved in two with a splintering sound, a thunder all its own to herald her arrival. Doris whirled one way, then another, face twisting from a blank slate into a mask of thwarted rage. She brought the axe slashing down onto the now empty desktop. No, not empty … and the axe head struck the kerosene lantern. It toppled from the desk, disappearing to the floor and then bursting into a sudden rush of flame. Doris went up a moment later, her housedress a caul of climbing fire. Her screams became frenzied, her movements a jittering marionette dance. Joshua turned away, unable to watch anymore. He worked his way to the corner of the roof, one hand clawing for a hold on the shingles while his other arm hugged the box. He eased over the roof’s edge. One leg hung over, then both … then he was dangling from the waist below, then from his chest.