Beckon (25 page)

They left the office and stepped out onto the street. Jack held the old journal tight under his arm. Down the street he saw Malcolm's rust-colored pickup parked at the filling station on the edge of town. George Wilcox stood beside it, pumping gas.

Elina waved and shouted, “George!”

“So you made it out of there,” George said as they ran up.

“Barely.” Jack looked up at the shadowy lodge perched at the top of the bluff. “What about the others?”

“Most of them are dead. Or dying. I watched Vale die myself. Just after I told him I had flushed the last of his precious perilium down the toilet.”

Elina peered into the garage windows. “They've got my car almost completely disassembled in there.”

“Yeah, mine too,” George said.

Elina shook her head. “They had their own chop shop set up to hide the evidence.”

George pointed to the fenced-in yard behind the station, overgrown with weeds. “They must turn them into scrap metal and stick them out back.”

Jack noticed a large bundle of linen lying in the bed of the pickup. It looked like a body wrapped in sheets.

“Is . . . is this your . . . ?”

“My wife, Miriam,” George said, putting his hand on the sheet. “I brought her here to try to save her life, but she . . .” His voice cracked with emotion. “But she ended up saving mine. I'm going to bring her home for a decent burial.”

“Would you mind giving us a ride?” Jack said. “I have an old RV that should still be parked a few miles away.”

George gestured to the cab. “Hop in.”

They climbed into the truck, and as George pulled back onto the road, Jack noticed the old wooden sign at the edge of town.

Welcome to Beckon. You're not here by chance.

And it struck him just then how true it was.

About the Author

Jump in. Hang on.

Tom Pawlik is the highly imaginative, Christy Award–winning author of
Vanish
,
Valley of the Shadow
, and
Beckon
. His thought-provoking, edge-of-your-seat thrillers are infused with nonstop suspense that grabs you on the first page and won't let go until the last.

Tom's fascination with the weird, the creepy, and the unknown began at a very early age when he was introduced to a nineteenth-century storybook called
Der Struwwelpeter
—a collection of nightmarish morality tales by a German physician who obviously had too much time on his hands. The Mother Goose–meets–Stephen King nursery rhymes included “Daumenlutscher” (“Thumbsucker”), a disturbing yarn about a young boy who was warned that if he continued to suck his thumbs, the local tailor would chop them off with his sewing shears. Other macabre tales warned against playing with matches and being overly messy. Needless to say, Tom never played with matches, generally kept his room clean, and to this day retains the use of both his thumbs.

But the psychological damage was already done, and Tom's warped imagination turned him to writing his own creepy stories at a rather young age. Alas, no publishers were brave enough to bring them to print, so Tom would not realize his lifelong dream of becoming a published author until the ripe old age of forty-two. Today, Tom lives in Ohio and is happily married with five children of his own . . . who, oddly enough, never sucked their thumbs.

Visit Tom's website at
www.tompawlik.com
.