CHAPTER FORTY TWO

Marrow Farm was their destination, but the place might as well have been on the dark side of the moon for all her Internet searches found about it.

Ella's eyes were glued to an endless stretch of asphalt that bisected oceans of corn. They'd blown past the ‘Now Leaving Yamhill' sign ten minutes ago and civilization had petered out and gave way to the primordial dark of the Oregon wilderness. All that remained was a backwater wasteland.

‘How far left, Redmond? You know where this place is?'

The sheriff gnawed his lip. ‘Out here somewhere. I swear it!' He jerked the wheel and sent them careening down a dirt track better suited to tractors.

‘When'd you last see Marrow Farm with your own eyes?'

‘Can't remember. Four presidents ago.'

She glanced at her cell. No bars, no GPS, no chance in hell of a digital assist should things go awry. Some things you couldn't leave to silicon and satellites. Right now, their only GPS was the sheriff's rusty memory, and Marrow Farm was the kind of place you only found if you knew the way.

Ella checked her Glock for the dozenth time, popped the mag, slammed it home. The weapon was an extension of her arm at this point, as much a part of her as her trigger finger. But even its familiar heft couldn't ground her, not with Luca's life hanging in the balance.

His face swam in her mind's eye – that cocksure grin, those bright eyes glinting with mischief or concentration as he puzzled over some casefile. The easy slope of his shoulders when he lounged in the precinct breakroom, lazily spinning theories. All of it, every stupid, wonderful, maddening inch of him – she couldn't lose it. Not like this. Not when she'd just found her one in seven billion.

But first, she had to find the bastard who took him.

Miles bled into more miles. The cruiser bounced over potholes the size of swimming pools. Redmond cursed under his breath and then, like a miracle or practical joke, he stabbed a finger at the windshield.

‘There! God damn, I'd recognize that shitheap anywhere.'

Ella squinted through the bugspattered glass. At first, she saw nothing – just an ocean of rotting cornstalks stretching to the horizon under a black sky. But then, as they crested a hill, it loomed into view.

Calling it a building felt generous. The thing hulked on the edge of a desiccated field like a tumor metastasized out of the very earth. Wood slats, gray as a corpse's flesh, bent inwards under the weight of its sagging roof. The windows were all blown out or boarded up, like gaping sockets in a dead man's face.

The roach motel at the end of the world, but maybe the place where a madman was holding her boyfriend.

And right smack in the center, swaybacked and shot through with rust, was a weathered sign that read:

MARROW FARM. EST 1897.

The same one from the photograph in Ghostlight Books. This was it.

Redmond cranked the wheel and brought the cruiser skidding into a gravel-spitting halt a hand's breadth from the sign. Before he could kill the engine, Ella was out, Glock drawn, ready for battle. As she passed the sign, the rest of the farm appeared. Beyond the building she'd seen from afar, she spotted the main house squatted off to one side. Then there was a dilapidated silo that thrust skyward like an accusing finger. Other outbuildings dotted the land; tool sheds, chicken coops, what might've once been a smokehouse.

And there, dead center of it all, stood the barn. The building she'd seen from a mile down the road, and perhaps the biggest damn barn she'd ever laid eyes on. It dwarfed everything else, a titan among lesser structures.

Redmond appeared beside her. ‘Which building?'

Something in Ella's primal brain, the part that'd kept her ancestors from being eaten by lions, screamed that the barn was where they needed to be.

Ella led the way across the damp grass and down to what she hoped was the entrance to the barn. But when she reached the door, something hit her.

Her blood flash froze. ‘Sheriff, you smell that?'

A now-wheezing Redmond said, ‘Gasoline.'

Ella let the thought settle. Cassius Auctor, or Vincent Marrow or whatever the hell his name was, suggested in his writings that he was planning on killing himself tonight. What if the crazy son of a bitch was planning on taking Luca with him? This psycho was exactly the kind of deluded wannabe-artist to go down with his ship.

‘He's going to torch the place.'

She pulled open the wooden door and stepped into the darkness within. She fished her Maglite from her pocket and cracked it to life. The thin beam captured snapshot glimpses of their surroundings – a derelict foyer, the remains of some ticket booth-looking setup, and ten tons of mold. Everything fuzzy with a decade's worth of cobwebs and dust.

‘Stay quiet, Sheriff. If he hears us, he might strike the match.'

As they crept deeper, the details began to resolve out of the murk. Framed posters hung at off-kilter angles, faces peering from beneath jaundiced glass. Jaunty, old-timey letters invited them to:

EXPERIENCE REAL HORRORS IN THE FLESH!

And below that:

ONCE YOU ENTER MARROW MAZE, YOU MAY NEVER LEAVE.

‘Load of crap,' Ella whispered. She unlocked the door and dived into what she guessed used to be a horror maze but was now just piles of old crap in a place nobody visited. And just like that, she and Redmond were in a whole new world of deeply wrong.

The narrow hall opened up into a churning vortex of visual delights. A forest of rotting corpses impaled on wooden stakes. Burn victims with visible ribcages. Spindly metal cribs splattered with blood. Cabinets overflowing with jarred fetuses suspended in murky brine.

And the smell grew stronger as Ella made her way through the rooms. The metallic bite filled the back of her throat and oozed into the darker recesses of her brain. This wasn't some two-bit carnival attraction. This was Vincent Marrow's personal purgatory, where he'd tried to exorcise those demons.

Don't look too close, she told herself. Breathe through your mouth. Follow the gasoline and let it pull you deeper into the bowels of this black little Wonderland.

A T-junction up ahead. The hall branched both ways. Ella pulled up short, neck swiveling as she tried desperately to game out which path of least resistance would spit them out closest to Luca.

‘Should we split up?' Redmond whispered.

No time to clear every nook and cranny. ‘You take go left, I'll go right.'

They went their separate ways, and Ella found herself in a room with no particular theme. One side had mannequins dressed up like the great alternative figures from history –Ted Bundy, Adolf Hitler, Aleister Crowley. The other side featured a priest with his head replaced by a dog's.

More rooms followed. Three, four, five. Ella stumbled through a post-apocalyptic biohazard scene, then what looked like an exploded Russian bordello complete with a deformed corpse on a stained mattress. But she had to keep moving. Put her back to the crazy on the walls and pray there was still something left to save.

Hold on, Luca . She didn't let herself finish the thought – just ran, full-tilt boogie, following the music to wherever this place ended.

But the deeper she dove, the more sideways it went. Halls branched and twisted like diseased arteries, doubling back and dead-ending in pockets of awful that bore zero resemblance to her point of entry. Ella skidded to a stop, breath coming ragged, panic surging from head to toe.

Ella was lost. Utterly, irretrievably lost in this black hole. She scanned the T-section she'd stumbled into, each wing promising untold fuckery and zero forward momentum. A sob rose in her throat only to die stillborn as Redmond crashed into the same clearing, one ham hock of a hand plastered to his thigh, wheezing like the little engine that couldn't.

'Dead end,' he gasped.

No. This couldn't be it. There had to be a way through, around, under. Ella spun in a tight circle, headlights on high beam, searching for…

There.

A door, sunk into a shadowed alcove. Paint-scrawled letters, barely legible:

EMPLOYEES ONLY.