ABOUT THIS KINDLE EDITION

ABOUT THIS KINDLE EDITION

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To Gerda, the love of my lives—this one

and the next.

Though they go mad they shall be sane,

Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;

Though lovers be lost love shall not;

And death shall have no dominion.

—Dylan Thomas

Part 1

| 1 |

She is lost, and he must find her, but she leaves no trail, no footprints or spoor of any kind, and the way is dark, for she has gone into the forest of the night, where the trees are black and leafless, where the moon and stars do not exist, where the sun will never rise, where the path is ever downward, yet he descends in a desperate search, for she does not belong here among the dead, not when she is so alive in his mind and heart, does not belong here, does not belong here, and although finding her is his only hope of joy, his only reason to exist, there are moments when he senses her within arm’s reach in the blinding darkness—and terror wakes him.

| 2 |

Crystal confetti showered on the city, a final celebration of a winter that, on this twenty-fourth day of March, lingered past its official expiration date.

Scarfed and booted, with his topcoat collar turned up, David Thorne walked the streets of Manhattan, ostensibly in search of inspiration. But his imagination was not stimulated.

The end-of-season storm lacked force. Snow spiraled through windless canyons, as gray as ashes until it fell below the hooded streetlamps and was bleached by the light.

If inspiration was not in fact his goal, if instead he was in need of company, he found none of that, either. The traffic in the streets might as well have been self-driven and without passengers, machines on errands of their own intention. Footprints patterned the inch of snow on the sidewalks. The bitter chill did not dissuade other pedestrians from being out and about, but to David they were as immaterial as ghosts.

By the time he returned to his apartment, he knew that he would soon be leaving for California.

That night he toured a cellar that he had never seen other than in dreams, a maze of half-lit chambers containing abominations from which he woke in a state of terror, his flesh and bones colder than the night beyond his windows.

In the morning, he called his literary agent, Charlie Placket, to say that he would be going to California for a month or two, until an idea for the next novel fully jelled.

“I have it on my calendar for April fifteenth,” Charlie said.

“Have what on your calendar?”

“You and California. It’s never been this early before.”

“I’m not that predictable, Charlie.”