Shallow Graves (The Haunted Book 1) Read online

  Get Patrick Logan’s Starter Library FOR FREE

  Sign up to my no-spam newsletter and get WITCH (Family Values Trilogy -Part 0) and the short story SYSTEM UPDATE FREE and be the first to know of sales, new releases, and exclusive contests!

  Details can be found at the end of this novel.

  Prologue

  Part I - Rain

  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

  Part II – Moving In

  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

  Part III – The Marrow

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Epilogue

  END

  Author’s Note

  The Seventh Ward

  Prologue

  PART I - Another Letter, Another Job

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Shallow Graves

  The Haunted Series

  Book 1

  Patrick Logan

  Prologue

  Hunger.

  Hunger gripped the girl’s stomach like an iron fist.

  How long has it been since I’ve eaten? Two days? Three?

  It was impossible to tell—the basement had no windows, no light. It could have been noon or midnight, there was just no way for her to know.

  She had tried to get out, of course. The first few days that she had been trapped down there, she had done everything she could to try to escape. But her efforts had only ended in tearing her fingernails off and making her voice raw from shouting. She had started with screaming, demanding to be let out, but when this had gone unanswered, she’d soon regressed to passionate pleas, desperate sobs, and eventually to apologies.

  It didn’t matter what she said; there was never any response.

  But while those upstairs ignored her, she had a much harder time ignoring them. She heard them fighting, muffled shouts from somewhere above, but she couldn’t make out the words no matter how hard she strained.

  Something scurried off to her left and she froze. It was the second time she had heard the noise. The first time she had heard it, she’d forced herself into a corner, wrapping her thin body into a ball. She hated spiders, cobwebs, even the dark. But the longer she spent in the basement, the more she became accustomed to these nightmarish things, adapted to them, even. She was amazed how the human body could adapt, but what the girl, even at her young age, quickly came to realize was that the proclivity for the human mind to adapt was even more impressive.

  It could adapt to nearly anything, any situation, no matter how desperate.

  So while her initial instinct was to freeze when the sound came again, her body and mind slowly thawed.

  So, so hungry.

  Her stomach grumbled, and without consciously doing so, she opened her palms and lay the backs of her hands gently on the dirt ground. She remained in a seated position, but silently shifted from her bum to her knees.

  The sound came a third time, a little closer now.

  It smells the blood—the blood on my fingertips from where the nails tore away.

  She wasn’t sure why she thought that, but in her head it sounded convincing enough.

  With her thumb, she flicked off a scab from the tip of her index finger, wincing at the pain. A warm wetness immediately covered her fingertip.

  Now can you smell it? Can you smell it now?

  As if answering her thoughts, she heard the sound just a little closer now. Concentrating hard, she thought she could even hear the rat’s nose wriggling.

  It took less than a minute of sitting completely still before she felt something probe her bloody finger. It was only a gentle touch, barely noticeable what with the pain from the torn nail and the slowly drying blood covering the wound. But when it came again, there was no doubting it.

  It was a rat, and it was licking her finger. For a moment, the girl did nothing, thankful for just the touch of something else, even if it was a rat and not another human being.

  To be touched.

  To be wanted, loved.

  These were things that she hadn’t felt in a long, long time. For as long as she could remember, maybe.

  They loved me once, before they started yelling about money all the time.

  A wan smile crossed over the little girl’s face in the dark, but it didn’t stay long.

  The mind could adapt, after all.

  And this was her new reality.

  In a flurry of movement that surprised even herself, the girl flipped her hand over and dug her fingers into the rat’s back. The thing squeaked, a horrible sound, but the girl tightened her grip, her fingers, long and thin, nearly wrapping completely around the rat’s body.

  She could feel its legs wriggling in her palm, and the warmth of its body in her grasp. For a brief second, the girl feared that it might wriggle free, but she squeezed even harder. She squeezed so hard that she thought she could feel its tiny heart beating deep within its furry body.

  Although it was completely dark in the basement, the girl brought the animal to her face anyway, and imagined how it looked: its wriggling nose, black and wet, its eyes, obsidian pits, and its buck teeth, yellow and protruding.

  Then her stomach groaned, and she brought the animal to her mouth. In the back of her mind, she knew what she was doing was disgusting, revolting even, but the will to survive pushed these thoughts away.

  Her teeth clamped down on the rat’s fur, and she felt a squeaky pop as she broke its skin like a toughened sausage casing. Blood spilled into her mouth, and she gagged. Suppressing this visceral reaction, she bit even harder, feeling several of the animal’s small bones crack in her mouth.

  She drowned out the rat’s squealing with her thoughts.

  Yes, she thought as she chewed. Survival; survival is what’s most important.

  “You still down there?”

  At first, she didn’t think the voice was real, just a figment of her imagination. It was such a foreign thing, another human voice, one addressing her no less, that she barely recognized it for what it was. But then it came again and the girl stopped chewing the gamey meat for a moment to listen.

  Could it be?

  The rat stopped moving.

  “They’ve gone out…I’m going to open the door now, but we have to be quick!”

  The girl swallowed and switched her grip from the dead rat’s body to its tail. Even though the words were clearer now, as if the person was speaking just from behind the door at the top of the staircase, she still didn’t fully believe that they were real.

  But then the door opened and a sliver of light spilled into the basement. Despite the light being gray, subdued, it was in such contrast to the dark basement that she immediately shielded her face with her forearm.

  A shadow fl
ickered across the narrow opening, but her eyes still hadn’t adjusted and she couldn’t make out what it was.

  “Hurry! C’mon! They won’t be out long!”

  The girl rose to her feet and made her way to the bottom of the staircase, rat still in hand.

  “Oh…oh God…” the person upstairs murmured.

  The girl could hear something else now—rain. She could hear rain pelting the roof, the sides of the house. To her sensitive ears every drop was like a ball bearing falling on tin.

  “Jesus…oh God…” the person retched, “please, you—you need to come with me.”

  The girl took a hesitant step forward, her bare foot touching the bottom stair.

  “Come on!”

  She could now make out the outline of a figure in the doorway, a hand gesturing madly for her to hurry. But sitting on the dirt floor in a pitch-black cellar for days on end had rendered urgency a foreign notion.

  “Hurry!”

  The girl was on the fourth step when she heard the front door to the estate open loudly.

  Both of them froze.

  “No,” the figure at the top of the stairs whimpered. “Daddy’s home…”

  The girl’s grip on the rat’s tail tightened.

  ***

  The girl was trembling, her feet just inches from the edge of the roof. Rain had thoroughly soaked her, her nightgown—soiled from the dirt in the basement—clinging uncomfortably to her rail-thin body. She took a deep breath and mentally prepared herself for what she instinctively knew came next.

  “Jump.” The voice was deep, gravelly. Authoritative.

  A voice that she knew she should probably listen to.

  But she couldn’t jump.

  “Jump.”

  Survival instincts suddenly took over, and she pivoted, intending to run back to the window, back inside. Away from the rain, the cold.

  The voice.

  But a hand reached out and grasped her soaking hair. It was a thick hand, heavily calloused from years of hard labor.

  “Jump,” the man said again. But this time, he didn’t wait for her to obey. Instead, he flung her by her hair. Her legs spun madly, desperately trying to gain traction on the slick roof. But the rain was coming down even heavier now, and her bare foot only caught the edge before she went flying over it.

  A scream caught in her throat, and the air roared in her ears. Somehow, during her fall, she flipped around and found herself staring at the flagstones as they rushed up to meet her.

  A split second before impact, however, they seemed to disappear. All of it—the rain, the house, the roof. Even the man that had thrown her off, her father. All of this was replaced by a frothing sea and a clear blue sky.

  She had never been to the ocean, but this was always how she imagined it would look. Soft, rolling whitecaps, like gently simmering butter on a fluffy pancake shore.

  For some reason, she knew that this place had a name, too, although it wasn’t one that she had ever heard before.

  The Marrow.

  A smile spread across her thin blue lips. But then the sky suddenly darkened and a crack of thunder ripped through serenity.

  The voice returned.

  “No, I’m not done with you yet.”

  Part I - Rain

  Chapter 1

  Robert Watts hesitated before clicking the print button. He sat back in his chair and ran his hand through his medium-length brown hair.

  Three months of work…once I press print, that’s it. Gone. Finito. Complete.

  His eyes skipped over the numbers that filled his monitor.

  Three months, then it’s gone. Into the accounting ether, never to be seen or heard from again.

  Robert always felt this way when he finished the accounting for one of the company’s larger clients. He invested his whole mind and body into the work, to the point that he felt as if he knew more about the company than upper management did about themselves. At least the numbers part of the business, anyway. He always felt a little empty when he finished one of the bigger projects, and today was no exception.

  If anything, today was actually worse, perhaps because he had been feeling particularly down lately, and partly because of the revelation that at their current pace, Butter and Squash Produce wouldn’t be able to make it to year’s end without filing for bankruptcy.

  He shook his head, blinked twice, then pressed PRINT.

  Not my problem, he thought.

  This part, too, made him feel a little off. It wasn’t his problem—his job was only to crunch the numbers—but still. He had met the owners, Dawn and Maureen, several times, and he liked them. Nice women, trying to find a niche market for their organic produce, to carve out their little piece of the American pie. But it wasn’t to be. It was times like this that he was grateful his job was only to crunch the numbers, and not to break the bad news.

  They would be devastated.

  With a sigh, Robert pulled himself out of the cheap plastic swivel chair and stood. He placed his hand on his lower back and tried to massage the soreness that had built over the past few hours from being rooted in place, and then offered a weak smile.

  Part of him also liked the idea of having completed another task, of checking one more box for works completed.

  The office was dark, the other cubicles long since having been abandoned, the younger desk jockeys retired to their homes to suck back energy drinks and play video games online. Or so he imagined.

  He checked his watched, and was surprised that it was only six thirty. His thoughts went to his family then, to his wife Wendy and their nine-year-old daughter Amy. Earlier that morning he had suggested that Wendy take Amy out to dinner, as he had expected to finish the Butter and Squash file much later than he actually had.

  Maybe I can catch them before they start, meet up with them. Or better yet, I can tell Wendy to grab a couple of steaks and meet me at home.

  It had been so long since they had had dinner—a real family dinner—what with his and Wendy’s busy schedules.

  I’ll call them after I hand this in, he reconciled, a small smile creeping onto his lips.

  Steak…steak would be nice.

  As if responding to his pondering, his stomach growled. Robert picked up the pace as he made his way across the empty office to the printer, which whirred away as it spat out page after page of sheets filled with numbers.

  The printing finished—eighty-nine pages in under a minute—before he even made it there. A quick glance to check that the pages were collated properly, then he slipped a wide clip on the top left-hand corner. Then he put the report into the folder marked Butter and Squash Produce.

  A quick glance revealed that the office wasn’t completely empty after all. He had been hoping that he was alone, that he could just slip the folder beneath his boss’s office door, but that wasn’t to be, he realized.

  Although the light in the office at the back of the row of cubicles was off, he could make out the outline of man crouched behind a computer screen, the top of his head awash in the blue-green glow.

  Robert’s smile faded as he approached the door. The man behind the desk didn’t raise his gaze.

  He knocked lightly on the door, his knuckles bouncing off the cheap particle board below the brass nameplate that read: Landon Underhill, Regional Manager.

  The man behind the computer cleared his throat.

  “Come in,” he said, and Robert pulled the door open.

  “Landon?” Robert asked, but when the man finally poked his head up, his thick black eyebrows rising up his expansive forehead, he hesitated. “Where’s Landon?”

  The man shifted a massive wad of gum from one pale cheek to the other.

  Gum…what kind of fifty-year-old man chews gum?

  One with chronic halitosis, that’s who. A skinny, bald man with arms like chicken legs and legs like chicken arms.

  “Landon cut out early, had some business to attend to.” The man gnashed the gum obnoxiously. “You finish the Butternut file
?”

  Robert nearly chuckled.

  Butternut.

  He held the folder up and strode across the room.

  “Have it right here, Carl,” he announced, a tinge of pride in his voice.

  Carl took the file with nicotine-stained fingers and put it down beside him.

  “You aren’t even going to look at it?”

  The man shrugged.

  “Not my job,” he admitted.

  Robert frowned as Carl turned back to his computer screen.

  “Well, I’m off. Gonna see if I can catch the wife and kid for dinner.”

  The man looked up again, his eyebrows doing a little dance up his large, pale forehead.

  “Why don’t you take a seat, Robert?”

  Robert glanced around. There were no other chairs in the room.

  “Carl?”

  The man peeked over his desk.

  “Ah, that’s right. Forgot that this is Landon’s office.”

  Carl slowly closed the top of his laptop, before folding his fingers and resting them on his desk. Now, with both of them bathed in near darkness, he looked strangely sinister.

  “Look, Robert. I hate to be the one to tell you this, but—”

  The man paused, and Robert’s heart immediately started to race. Any dialogue that started with, I hate to be the one, never ended well. And now Carl, assistant to the regional manager, destined to be the office bitch, Landon’s lackey, wouldn’t even make eye contact.

  “What? What is it?”

  “Well, I guess there’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just gonna.”

  And yet, despite his words, he paused again.

  Robert felt his face start to flush.

  Please, not now.

  “What?” The question came out more aggressively than he had intended, and Carl’s eyes snapped up. Now, seeing that there was a challenge, the bald man seemed imbued with courage.

  “Look, Landon wanted to let you know that there are going to be some changes here at Audex Accounting—some downsizing. And I—”

  Robert was incredulous, his gaze darting to the thick folder that he had just handed the man. The folder that he had spent the last three months busting his balls to get done on time.