Demon Harvest Read online

  Praise for Patrick C. Greene and His Haunted Hollow Chronicles

  Red Harvest

  “Greene has brought a brilliant level of complexity and humanity to a horror novel.”

  —Book Nerd’s Brain Candy

  “I found myself getting completely lost in this sleepy little farm community and wishing I could live in a town like this…until the killings started, of course [. . .] Patrick C. Greene doesn’t hold a single thing back.”

  —Cameron Chaney, YouTube

  Books by Patrick C. Greene

  The Haunted Hallow Chronicles

  Red Harvest

  Grim Harvest

  Demon Harvest

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

  Demon Harvest

  The Haunted Hollow Chronicles

  Patrick C. Greene

  LYRICAL PRESS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  Contents

  Books by Patrick C. Greene

  Demon Harvest

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Epilogue

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Chapter 1

  About the Author

  Copyright

  To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  LYRICAL UNDERGROUND BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2020 by Patrick C. Greene

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  All Kensington titles, imprints, and distributed lines are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotion, premiums, fund-raising, educational, or institutional use.

  Special book excerpts or customized printings can also be created to fit specific needs. For details, write or phone the office of the Kensington Sales Manager: Kensington Publishing Corp., 119 West 40th Street, New York, NY 10018. Attn. Sales Department. Phone: 1-800-221-2647.

  Lyrical Underground and Lyrical Underground logo Reg. US Pat. & TM Off.

  First Electronic Edition: September 2020

  ISBN-13: 978-1-5161-0832-9 (ebook)

  ISBN-10: 1-5161-0832-9 (ebook)

  First Print Edition: September 2020

  ISBN-13: 978-1-5161-0835-0

  ISBN-10: 1-5161-0835-3

  Printed in the United States of America

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to my mother, Daisy Juanita Jones, who kept my brothers and me out trick or treating far later than was reasonable.

  Author’s Note

  We live in a world of wonderful and amazing technology that gives us instant access to each other and the rest of society. Ember Hollow is not in that world. No cell phones, no internet. Its residents need wit and courage to survive. Quite often, that won’t be enough.

  Prologue

  Cronus County, Eastern North Carolina

  Modern day

  “Such beautiful country,” Maisie commented, smiling over the edge of her half-open window at another of countless farm fields. Most were desolate and weed-pocked. A few, like this one, were dotted with orange spheres. “Forgive me, Ysabella, but I wish you were wrong.”

  Ysabella Escher nodded, staring across a similar field from the passenger side of her Mercedes. She had removed her sunglasses and let her window all the way down a few miles back, happy to accept the scents and sounds carried on this October day’s warm wind.

  The elder witch clutched her left hand in her right, knowing it was a giveaway. No sense in hiding it. Maisie had surely read her growing unease by now.

  Maisie slowed the Mercedes. “Is it…?”

  “Getting stronger,” answered her elder. “Worse.”

  “I’m turning around.”

  “No, Maisie!” Ysabella raised her trembling hand to her neck. “Just stop. Here.”

  Maisie pulled off the road, pained to see Ysabella fumbling with the door handle before the car was even fully stopped. Yet, even in physical distress, the sixty-two-year old’s grace was admirable.

  Ysabella stepped to the edge of the pumpkin field and dropped to her knees, just as a thick stream of crimson fluid burst from her mouth like a firehose opened full-throttle.

  Maisie clamped her mouth to silence a pained gasp as she watched her elder witch jet-vomit across a quintet of pumpkins and surrounding soil. The red fountain flowed in an impossible volume of fluid.

  Maisie ran to Ysabella, kneeling beside her teacher, despite her revulsion at the spill. She rubbed the old woman’s shaking shoulders and spoke words of comfort and healing under her breath. At twenty-four, Maisie had already seen a lifetime of strange, wonderful, heartbreaking and terrifying things. But it was never easy to watch her mentor suffer.

  A minute later, as Ysabella began to gulp shuddery breaths, Maisie held the petite enchantress tightly to keep her from collapsing. Ysabella allowed her weight to rest in Maisie’s arms. The younger woman stroked the elder’s gray-streaked brown curls out of her pained face.

  Hearing a rising hiss, Maisie dared a glance at the jagged line of smoking and charred ground—like a spent gunpowder fuse—rising from Ysabella’s violent regurgitation. The splashed pumpkins lay collapsed, rotted, disintegrating.

  It was small comfort for Maisie that it wasn’t actual blood her teacher had spewed, but an etheric by-product of her visions.

  The crone took Maisie’s hand. “It’s much worse than I could have foreseen here,” she weakly croaked. “This town. This…evil.”

  Maisie traced a sigil of vitality on Ysabella’s back with her finger. “And you won’t let me take you away from here. No matter how I beg.”

  “Call…the others,” Ysabella said. “Get them here now.”

  “Ysabella, respectfully…we…we
’re not complete. We need to make our coven whole before we—”

  “No time. It’s too close to Halloween,” said Ysabella, eyes blazing blue with late-day sun and earnest wisdom. “Samhain. If we don’t start now…no number of us will be enough to save this place.”

  Chapter 1

  American Witch

  Ember Hollow settlement

  Circa 1670

  Hezekiah Hardison smiled at the memory of childish fear that had descended upon him like a vulture the first time he made this nocturnal sojourn back in midsummer.

  On this night, the half-moon provided more than enough light for him to traverse the footpath between fields and forest from Conal O’Herlihy’s place on the hill. He could usually count on the company of neighbor Friedrich Schroeder up to this point, but the Dutchman had not attended the meeting.

  These late, clandestine gatherings with Conal O’Herlihy and his other followers, coupled with his wariness of these strange lands, had once left Hezekiah a nervous wreck, requiring a jar of dandelion wine and a long smoke of his pipe to calm him enough for sleep. He was glad to say he barely noticed the odd noises and shadows of the forest night any longer.

  Until he reached the cornfield, where a mute army of scrawny troops formed across several acres of Schroeder’s land.

  It would be shorter to cut through the middle of this field. But Hezekiah was not about to traverse the narrow aisle in the dark between tall, ever-rustling rows whose inhabitants seemed to lean forward and inspect him as he passed.

  Worse, neighbor Schroeder had built what he called a bootzaman—a figure made from old clothes dressed on a frame and stuffed with straw and leaves to appear human. Raised on a cross with arms spread like a mocking idol of Christ, it was meant to scare away the ornery crows that brazenly helped themselves to the crop.

  Smiling with satisfaction befitting an acclaimed painter, Schroeder had shown the false man to Hezekiah under blazing daylight. It had left him in such a state of unease that he came to dread opening his door after dark, for fear the crow-scarer would be there, issuing its perpetual, silent threat.

  Hezekiah knew that Schroeder often moved the man-thing around the field to keep black-feathered thieves on their toes. It was somewhere among the stalks.

  Hezekiah did not wish to ever encounter it again, in any light. He hadn’t grown that brave.

  However, he had overcome his fear of the odd orange fruit that grew here in the new world this time of year, the one the settlers discovered growing alongside corn and apples when summer began to wane.

  Hezekiah had once imagined the huge fruits as monstrous bald demon heads waiting for him to come close so they could rise to the full heights of their misshapen bodies. They would drag him to hell as they mockingly cried out a litany of his frequent impure thoughts for Margaret Worthington, Mary Hodgins, Glory Brightwell, and a good many other of the settlement’s womenfolk.

  Now, Hezekiah saw only another harmless crop, no different from the hay and potatoes that filled their barns and barrels as winter threatened. A shortcut over the quiet, musky soil of the pumpkin patch only made good sense.

  Peering through the steam of his own breath for the candle lantern he’d left hanging outside his door, still a good two dozen yards away, Hezekiah caught a whoop of surprise in his throat as he tripped on the vine of one of the ubiquitous squashes.

  “Damn you!” He kicked the mute obstacle, thinking of Conal O’Herlihy’s fiery rail he had listened to less than an hour ago, against the evil the Irishman was sure had infected the settlement, wickedness that the Lord had shown to the fiery zealot via the fungus, despair that would run rampant and claim them all if not soon addressed.

  Looking toward the clearing where his homestead stood, Hezekiah again strained to spot the candle lamp. Since that afternoon, a steady autumn wind had come and gone. But it shouldn’t have been enough to unsettle the lantern hung on a peg outside his door. The beacon was as sturdy as they came, and the candle set within had many hours yet.

  No matter. Just past Friedrich Schroeder’s cornfield, his clearing would be unmistakable, even under this weak moon.

  The cornstalks rattled against each other in the steady wind, like the dying leaves of poplar trees all around his homestead, or the tail tips of the deadly snakes that had them all wary of where they trod during the hot season.

  Hezekiah knew that he and others from the settlement would soon be called upon to help with harvesting the well-bred ears of the field he was passing, though Schroeder himself often mysteriously seemed to fall ill when his time came to reciprocate.

  Still, the Dutchman’s special wine was as good as his corn, and often given freely.

  Hezekiah wondered why Schroeder had not attended the evening’s meeting. It was the first he had missed, though Schroeder seemed well devoted to O’Herlihy’s cause. Hezekiah already bore a measure of distrust for Schroeder, owing to the Dutchman’s growing love of his own product—the one other than corn, of course.

  Surely, with all he stood to lose, Friedrich Schroeder would not betray his friends to—

  Hezekiah froze in his tracks.

  A strange amber glow appeared, cresting the hill a few yards to his left.

  The Devil.

  Sinister eyes and mouth burned orange, floating and dancing in the sharp air.

  To mock Hezekiah’s secret fears, the Author of Evil had taken the form of a pumpkin.

  A low snicker, at once childishly innocent and wickedly ancient, issued from the fire-filled gourd.

  Hezekiah felt the urge to run, like the pull of a strong mule, and did not resist it. But no sooner had he pivoted than his feet again tangled in the vines of the new-world fruit—servants, after all, of the encroaching, orange-faced Satan. He pitched forward and fell upon the cold, earthen rooftop of The Devil’s hot home.

  With sharp grunts, Hezekiah kicked and scrambled, reaching for the matchlock at his side. But it too was trapped, twisted at an unwieldy angle by his fall. He tried rolling to his side to free the weapon, but the vines twisted tighter. He needed to twist his body the other way.

  He did—just as the childish mirth sounded closer.

  The burning-eyed demon floated above him, held aloft by something its inner flame—Hezekiah’s own lamp candle—revealed to be far worse.

  Schroeder’s scarecrow.

  Behind ragged strands of rough fabric, very real eyes and teeth reflected the candlelight. Real, yet only vaguely human.

  This was not Lucifer, but Hezekiah prayed it was Schroeder, having a cruel ruse at his expense. He prayed but knew, by the madness those eyes held, that it was not.

  “Trrrick!” said the scarecrow in a gleeful voice, as it held high in its right hand the pumpkin it had carved.

  “Trrrreat!” it continued, as it raised a shiny hand sickle in its left, the blade stringy with pumpkin innards.

  Hezekiah renewed the struggle for his weapon, exposing the side of his neck, the part the scarecrow knew would splash and spray blood so wonderfully.

  In his nifty new scarecrow costume, Everett Geelens, many centuries later to be known as the Trick-or-Treat Terror, played with his pretty new toy, sharing it, in his way, with Hezekiah Hardison.

  * * * *

  Modern day

  “When I’m sheriff, I’m gonna get a helicopter for stuff like this,” Yoshida had quipped to Hudson as they set up the hunter’s blind. That was three days ago. It seemed like three years.

  The culmination of months of planning, this “stakeout,” for lack of a better word, had the Cronus County Sheriff’s Department’s two ranking officers camped out in what was essentially a treehouse for potentially as long as four days.

  It was no pleasure outing. Despite consisting of precious vacation and sick time, this outing was pure duty.

  The elevated shelter, which Hudson and Yoshida had started plannin
g and building the previous winter, sat nearly two dozen feet off the forest floor, wedged in the strong fork of a towering elm and hidden from below by strategically placed poplar branches and camouflage netting.

  Eight feet square, the wooden box barely accommodated the duo. Food supplies were limited to bland necessities meant to provide energy and limiting waste scent production. Water was consumed sparingly. Latrine buckets were emptied into heavy-duty garbage bags that were hoisted through the roof above the hide and left to hover over them like a disgusting sword of Damocles. A flashlight, wax paper taped over its red lens and pointing straight up, gave a modest hint of illumination in the cramped shack.

  Rugged as these conditions were for the deputies, they were mild compared to those suffered by their bait down on the ground, a juvenile fawn. They had placed her in a painless snare just for this purpose, to keep her relatively comfortable while they watched her through the scopes of their tranquilizer rifles, which lay poised in the narrow slot that was the blind’s third opening.

  They passed notes using legal pads—they were on their fifth—and traded off watching the bait while the other did push-ups and sit-ups, read or napped. Long before day three, the cramped solitude had begun to wear on them. If the two longtime friends had allowed themselves to speak at this point, they would surely have screamed at each other.

  Hudson peered through the night-vision scope of a tranquilizer rifle loaded with high-dosage darts, which he had ordered from a gunsmith in Eagle Ridge. Beside him, Yoshida peered through an identical scope attached to a more traditional hunting gun.

  Unlike Hudson’s, his rifle was loaded with silver-tipped bullets, for a worst-case-scenario shot.

  They had good reason to remain vigilant. This spot was less than a mile from where the first of many cattle killings had occurred, starting less than a year ago. It had been abandoned by bears and other known predators. This was a sure sign that a more dominant carnivore had taken over the area.

  After the events of the previous year’s Devil’s Night, they knew that only one animal could be more dominant than bears and wolves.