Afterlife - Douglas Clegg [0]
by Douglas Clegg
Author of Isis and The Priest of Blood
Cover image by 2008©Caniglia from www.Caniglia-Art.com, used here with permission. This cover design was created for the Cemetery Dance limited edition hardcover, used here with permission.
AFTERLIFE is published by Alkemara Press, 2009 with permission from the author.
Copyright 2004, 2008© Douglas Clegg, used here with permission, all rights reserved including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
Be sure and visit www.DouglasClegg.com for more information about Douglas Clegg and his books of horror, suspense, and dark fantasy.
Look for Isis, a Tale of the Supernatural by Douglas Clegg in bookstores beginning October 2009.
Contents
Cover
Dedication
Books by Douglas Clegg
Afterlife
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Biography
Free Excerpt from The Words by Douglas Clegg
Books by Douglas Clegg
Goat Dance
Breeder
Neverland
Dark of the Eye
The Children's Hour
Bad Karma (pen name - Andrew Harper)
The Halloween Man
The Nightmare Chronicles
Purity
You Come When I Call You
Mischief
Naomi
The Infinite
The Hour Before Dark
Red Angel (pen name - Andrew Harper)
Nightmare House
Night Cage (pen name - Andrew Harper)
Afterlife
The Abandoned
The Machinery of Night
The Priest of Blood (Available on Kindle)
Mordred, Bastard Son
The Attraction
The Necromancer
The Lady of Serpents (Available on Kindle)
Wild Things: Four Tales
The Queen of Wolves (Available on Kindle)
The Words
Mr. Darkness
The Innocents at the Museum of
Antiquities
Isis
For Dean Koontz—mentor, friend, colleague, who continues to write and inspire.
AFTERLIFE
“We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so at the moment after death.”
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
“There are monsters in the world. They’re called human beings.”
—Michael Diamond, from The Life Beyond
Prologue
1
In the testing room, the boy stared at the others from behind the glass. He raised his fists and began hitting the thick pane. His cries for help were unheard by the others. The flames shot up in the booth around him, moving rapidly up the boy’s back as he pounded harder, his mouth open impossibly wide. He shut his eyes as if trying to block it all out or to send his mind to another, safer place.
The others watched, safe on the opposite side of the triple-thick fireproof glass, and waited as the fire burned away the boy’s shirt. They each held hands, and one of the girls said, “Look at how scared he is.”
“We need to get out,” a teenager said. “Now.”
And then the fire shattered the glass, moving beyond the booth, beyond the testing room, as if the air itself burned out of control.
2
In the 1970s, rumor went that a small, privately funded school in Manhattan existed where young children with special talents were being observed and tested for what were then labeled “PSI” abilities. Little is known about the school, other than what remained enshrouded in the urban legends of the city. The conspiracy theory was that the government or several governments funded the school and used it to learn more about the human mind, about child development with extra-sensory ability, and perhaps how to use those abilities in some covert way. Another story was that it was simply formed by a group who believed that these so-called “special children” should have a safe place to develop their talents. Still another suggestion had been that this was one of the city’s many small private schools that didn’t contain a trace of the psychic or the occult, but that some of the former students themselves spread that rumor as a joke to discredit the school.
One of the rumors had to do with a little boy who had precipitated the closing of the secret school when he somehow was responsible for the death of another child.
Other than hints in Rolling Stone, in the Village Voice, in New York Underground News—and even now, in an occasional mention of the school on the Internet—nothing substantiated this tale,