Reviver: A Novel by Seth Patrick

Author:Seth Patrick [Patrick, Seth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2013-06-18T06:00:00+00:00

20

Flashes of awareness came, memory and dream combined.

The moment he let go of his mother’s hand.

In his car, driving along a road he had not seen before but that was utterly familiar.

The family Dominic Pritchard had killed.

A door opening, a young woman’s confused face.

The baffling answers Lyssa Underwood had given to the questions he’d been told to ask her.

And then, cold and real: he was Daniel Harker, tied to a chair in a dim-lit cellar. In front of him was the face Jonah had seen scorched and twisted under a white plastic tarpaulin two days before; alive now, but grim, his eyes wide with fear and alcohol.

‘We’re the only ones who know,’ said Ginger. A bottle of vodka in hand. He swigged. ‘We’re the only ones who can stop it. Something came from the dark. It came from the dark and talked to them.’

* * *

Jonah opened his eyes, pain in his head and the larval itch still present. His mouth tasted terrible. He rubbed furiously at his neck, the dreams fresh and unwelcome in his mind. He sat up, looking around him, confused and cold and drowsy, feeling like he hadn’t slept at all.

Then he realized that he had no idea where he was.

The room was both familiar and alien – a jumble of old trinkets on every surface, a large-screen television in one corner, book-loaded shelves covering the walls. He stood from the couch he had been laying on, wary. His jacket was draped across an armchair, his car keys on top. As he went to pick them up, he saw a framed photograph on one shelf. Daniel Harker, his wife and daughter. Beside it, a picture he had seen before. The one Harker had used for the jacket photo in his revival books, of him standing alone on windswept shingle, the sea behind him. Wearing a long coat.

The pieces began to slot together in his mind. The image came of Harker’s corpse, advancing towards him. He shivered. Harker had brought him here. The same thing that had happened to Victor Eldridge had happened to him. The remnant had taken control.

With one difference. Eldridge had been fully aware while powerless, but Jonah had no idea what Harker had done after taking over. The shards of dream and memory from the night before were all the clues he had, and they were already slipping from him. Vague images of Harker’s daughter were all that came now.

‘Something came from the dark,’ he said aloud, wondering where he had heard those words. Then he remembered Harker’s kidnapper, fearful eyes and terror in his voice.

Remembered? Could he call it that? It was Harker’s memory, not his own: It came from the dark and talked to them.

A noise from another room startled him – a clink of glass, sharp in the silence. He went to the hall, turned and saw Annabel Harker asleep, slumped with her head on the kitchen table, a bottle of whisky and an overturned glass in front of her.

He wanted out of there.

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