He didn’t consider himself a recluse; he didn’t consider himself unsociable. He simply lived his life exactly as he chose. He’d done the same thing six years before … before the fame, success and large advances.

If someone had asked him if having a string of bestsellers had changed his life, he’d have answered, why should it? He’d been a writer before The Devil’s Due had shot to number one on the New York Times list. He was a writer now. If he’d wanted his life to change, he’d have become a plumber.

Some said his lifestyle was calculated—that he created the image of an eccentric for effect. Good promotion. Some said he raised wolves. Some said he didn’t exist at all but was a clever product of a publisher’s imagination. But Hunter Brown had a fine disregard for what anyone said. Invariably, he listened only to what he wanted to hear, saw only what he chose to see and remembered everything.

After pressing a series of buttons on his word processor, he set up for the next chapter. The next chapter, the next word, the next book, was of much more importance to him than any speculative article he might read.

He’d worked for six hours that day, and he thought he was good for at least two more. The story was flowing out of him like ice water: cold and clear.

The hands that played the keys of the machine were beautiful—tanned, lean, long-fingered and wide-palmed. One might have looked at them and thought they would compose concertos or epic poems. What they composed were dark dreams and monsters—not the dripping-fanged, scaly-skinned variety, but monsters real enough to make the flesh crawl. He always included enough realism, enough of the everyday, in his stories to make the horror commonplace and all too plausible. There was a creature lurking in the dark closet of his work, and that creature was the private fear of every man. He found it, always. Then, inch by inch, he opened the closet door.

Half-forgotten, the cigarette smoldered in the overflowing ashtray at his elbow. He smoked too much. It was perhaps the only outward sign of the pressure he put on himself, a pressure he’d have tolerated from no one else. He wanted this book finished by the end of the month, his self-imposed deadline. In one of his rare impulses, he’d agreed to speak at a writers’ conference in Flagstaff the first week of June.

It wasn’t often he agreed to public appearances, and when he did it was never at a large, publicized event. This particular conference would boast no more than two hundred published and aspiring writers. He’d give his workshop, answer questions, then go home. There would be no speaker’s fee.