Time's Edge (The Chronos Files Book 2) by Rysa Walker

Author:Rysa Walker [Walker, Rysa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyscape
Published: 2014-10-20T23:00:00+00:00

∞13∞

I sit down at the small kitchen table and pull my helmet off. The inside is now a nearly uniform shade of gray. I run my finger across it, and sure enough, it comes away coated with the temporary hair color.

Kiernan climbs down from the loft, a yellow box under one arm. He hands it to me, and I run my fingertip over his wrist, leaving a silvery trail. “Oops,” he says, looking back up at me. “Sorry about that.”

“Ri-i-ght. I don’t believe you for even a second. How badly is it smeared?”

“Um . . . it’s bad. Looks like you’re wearing a gray helmet.”

I narrow my eyes and yank the box toward me before noticing Kiernan’s expression. He’s looking at it as though it houses something poisonous. I decide to treat it with a bit more caution and lift the lid gingerly.

No snakes or spiders. Aside from the CHRONOS diary at the bottom of the box, it’s nothing more than newspaper clippings, maybe a dozen in all, with headlines like “Grisly Scene in Backwoods Church,” and “Greene County Deaths Still a Mystery.” Most of them are just text, dated late September 1911, but two of the articles near the bottom have photographs.

I begin with those, but after I see the pictures, I wish I’d started with the text-only articles and worked up an immunity. The images are both black and white, and they aren’t especially gory. But they are eerie as hell.

“How many dead?” I ask.

“One account said forty-seven; another said forty-eight. There was at least one small kid, so maybe someone just counted the heads in the pews and didn’t look in laps. The village is isolated, but they’re pretty sure it was the entire population. A few of their people always came into town for supplies once a week, like clockwork. When they didn’t show up two weeks in a row, someone went looking.”

The pictures are both taken inside a tiny, rustic church with a simple pulpit, adorned only by a cross in the middle. To the right of the pulpit is a woman’s body, tall and thin, sitting upright on a bench, her head slumped against the top of the dark wood panel separating the pulpit area from the small choir loft directly behind it. A chest about the size of a coffee table, standing waist high on long, thin legs, sits off to the left, the lid open. Something inside the chest reflects light from the windows, but I can’t tell what it is.

My eyes instinctively avoid the foreground of the image, where bodies slump to the side or lean against each other in most of the pews. A child’s arm dangles over one side. The bodies seem intact, but the skin looks strange. And they’re emaciated, some appearing almost mummified.

“Notice anything odd?” Kiernan asks, crouching down beside me to look over my shoulder. “Other than the fact that they’ve all died inside the church. And that they all look like the life has been sucked out of them.

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