Chapter 1

The Job

Retired homicide detective Francis Hernandez pulled up to an enormous white house in Katy, Texas – a suburb of Houston. He double-checked the address Mr. Highgarden's personal assistant had related over the phone – he'd hate to knock on the wrong door. Seeing that he was indeed in the right place, he made his way up the long garden path and knocked on the door. It was almost immediately answered by the maid. The Highgardens were clearly rich as hell. The entryway alone was bigger than Frank's whole apartment. The retired detective with gray in his hair and beard tried not to stare at it like a rube, and instead looked over the housekeeper who had let him in – her hands were shaking. Whatever the man of the house wanted to talk about – it shook her too. "Do you know why your boss wanted to speak to me?" he asked.

"I think he wanted to … he wants somebody to look into what happened to Skyler and Marta … his daughter and my granddaughter … and their friends last year," she said haltingly.

"What did happen – that you know about?"

"I … I don't know. No one knows. They just … they went down to a private beach for spring break and Marta was the only one who came back." Frank had heard rumors about the incident – he was from the big city so it wasn't like they were kids he had watched grow up, but he was sure he'd seen it on the six o'clock news a few times. A bunch of rich kids from the suburbs heading down to Mexico to have a good time, something crazy happened, and only one kid came back raving like a lunatic. They suspected her for a little while but the police quickly decided she wasn't very likely to have been the perpetrator – it was hard to imagine a tiny girl taking on five other kids, especially when three of them were athletes. The theory of the crime was that several assailants had attacked the vacationing Americans for whatever reason, and one kid – Marta – managed to narrowly escape with her life and was so traumatized by the attack that she had a mental breakdown. They never found the bodies of the other kids – they'd been staying out on a little island near the shore – but there was a ton of blood and miscellaneous tissue found at the scene, more blood belonging to each of the missing kids than they could have lost and survived. The going theory was the bodies were thrown in the ocean and carried away by waves and eaten by sharks. Frank had no idea what he could possibly add to that … he had his contacts yes but unless Marta had brought herself to remember something, there wasn't much he could do. Surely that was it – Marta had remembered something, and Mr. Highgarden wanted to consult with a professional about it before going to the actual authorities.

"Mr. Highgarden will see you now," the personal assistant Frank had spoken to said and stuck her head into the entryway. Frank followed her into a living room bigger than most houses, with thick white carpet and various pieces of expensive-looking furniture that probably cost more than Frank's whole house. A late middle-aged man, presumably the man of the house, sat on one beige-colored couch next to a young woman, presumably Marta. Frank extended his hand to both in turn, and after the customary handshake took a seat on the matching loveseat across the coffee table from them. Marta seemed to stare right through him – she was a tiny girl, maybe five feet tall, and she looked young for her age, but there was a look of determination in her amber-colored eyes that few could match. There was a huge binder, filled to bursting with something or other, at her side. "So, Detective Hernandez," Mr. Highgarden started.

"Oh, it's just Mr. Hernandez now," Frank said quickly. He didn't want to encourage whatever crazy ideas they had.

"Mr. Hernandez. You're probably wondering why I brought you here."
"Well, yes, sir, though I can guess it has something to do with the tragedy in Mexico. I'm sorry for your loss, sir, but I'm not sure …"
"There's a pattern," Marta said, cutting him off.

"I'm sorry?" Frank asked. A pattern to what?
"I wanted to figure out if … anybody had a similar experience to me. I started checking every news source I could find … sometimes weird news sources. I started with just any unexplained disappearance, and then I picked up a pattern. There's a lot of cases of whole groups of teenagers or young adults disappearing, usually in groups of four or five but sometimes more," she said, lifting the heavy binder at her side and handing it to Frank. "But there's a really weird thing … when it's four, there's usually one survivor, always a girl, who either has no idea what happened to the others or was telling some kind of crazy story … like I did with the fish man." Frank, already uncomfortable when she started speaking, reluctantly took the binder and flipped through it. The very first story he opened to wasn't promising – it did indeed describe what she had, but it was from a very unreliable-looking paper. One of those that had "weird stories" about Bigfoot and the like.

"Look, I know it sounds crazy … but I know what I saw," she said adamantly. Mr. Highgarden put a hand on her shoulder. "I might have had to lie to certain people to get out of the hospital … but I never doubted it, I never had to lie to myself."

"And I believe her," Mr. Highgarden added. "I know it seems crazy – half the sources in there are not exactly reputable. But it's … just so distinctive of a pattern. That's why we wanted to have a professional look at it – to see if there was anything to these in local reports."

"And then … figure out what's going on, if there is anything," Marta added. So there was self-awareness in the claims she was making – she knew it wasn't necessarily believable, but she was convinced nonetheless.

"I'd be willing to pay you for your time, regardless of the outcome," Mr. Highgarden added. "I'll match whatever you were getting on the force."

"Why me instead of a private detective?"
"We thought that police officers might be more willing to talk to another officer rather than a PI," Marta said. Fair enough. Frank looked from the young woman to the man of the house, who had a hand on her shoulder like a father, knowing that she'd been through something awful and he'd lost a daughter to it.

"I can't make any promises …" he said after a long moment of hesitation. "But I'll look into it."

Everything was bright and white and sterile. And cold. It had been for a long time.

The only escape was into the boy's mind, and it wouldn't last long. He was somewhere far away – somewhere cold. Not that that was any different. But it was warm in his apartment – a weirdly orderly little place that belied the age of the occupant.

The boy was asleep in his bed, shirtless despite the cold but buried in blankets, more peaceful in sleep than he looked in any photograph.

He was a very pretty boy – fair but darkheaded, slight and thin but strong in a wiry way.

He was too old, and yet there was an innocence and inexperience about him that made him … interesting.

He smelled too old – his neck still carried the lingering scent of cologne presumably put on the morning before, and his sweat bore the unmistakable scent of adulthood – but the way he trembled when a pretty girl ran her fingers down his neck … Oh how he trembled …

And his eyes were too large for his face, like a child's eyes. "Charlie?" he asked in shock as those beautiful eyes popped open.

"Why did you run away, Herbie?" Charlie asked, and then her throat opened and blood poured out into the boy's bed and onto the boy himself.

And he looked worryingly unfazed by this. He flinched at first, but then shook his head and sat up, wiping blood from his face and reaching for a pair of thick-rimmed glasses on his nightstand. "You're dead, Charlie. It doesn't matter to you," he said, and reached under the bed for something, which turned out to be a hunting rifle. Time to retreat.

Damn. Kid had nerves of steel.

Everything was sterile and white and cold again – the boy's lack of fear made his mind too hard to hold onto.

Soon. Soon the boy would be afraid, soon his mind would be warm and pulsating, full of tremulous fear, turning against him.

And then … then Freddy could have some real fun.