Flight Sam ran, skidded, and tumbled back to the mouth of the combe. He’d just cleared the fence when, in the distance, he saw a dozen tiny flickers slowly snaking toward him.  Soon he could see that the flickers were candles, that each candle was held by a person wearing a hooded cloak like Ms. […]

Ashes to Ashes Sam wandered for a good while until he saw the V-shaped poplar again. This time, he realized it was actually two trees—one white, the other black—but growing so close together they appeared to stem from a common trunk split at the roots. There was no longer any body in the dense brush behind […]

Mission Accomplished Men were wearing hooded cloaks and mumbling in Latin, their heads bowed in prayer. One of the men pushed back his hood. It was Mason Alderhut.  One of the other men pushed a small, mangy boy wearing rags for clothes before Alderhut. The boy stumbled and fell, his hands trussed behind him with […]

The Devil’s Combe Despite Evan’s barely coherent directions, Sam found the Devil’s Combe and the section of electrified fence Evan and Dale had bypassed with jumper cables. He crawled under and began hacking his way through the overgrowth, down into a deep hollow.  Fog rolled into the hollow off the Atlantic marine layer and billowed out […]