The Ferryman Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  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

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  EPILOGUE

  AFTERWORD

  Praise for The Ferryman

  “With his customary style and economy, Christopher Golden has penned a powerful and haunting tale.” —Clive Barker

  “Golden delivers what I’m looking for: good, old-fashioned storytelling with a contemporary sensibility. There’s no lack of tension, and he doesn’t back away from the consequences of the darkness he has set upon his characters.... I liked his deft touch with his characters, his crisp prose, and how he lets the story unfold.” —Charles de Lint

  “The Ferryman is a compulsive read, one I finished in a single sleep-deprived night. The characters are easy to care about, the story unpredictable and involving. Rarest of all, Golden conveys the terrible sadness of the supernatural in a way few authors have managed.” —Poppy Z. Brite

  “Low-key but quite effective horror.” —Don D’Ammassa

  “An intelligent, compelling ghost story in the classic horror tradition.... Superior characterization, an exquisitely detailed setting, and superbly orchestrated suspense set this above the usual run of horror novels.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A horrifying, disturbing assault... tight, focused and almost claustrophobically intimate.”—Fangoria

  “The Ferryman [is] shot through with a sadness that sometimes gently aches and other times deeply wounds. Golden’s subtle and clever way with a plot really shines.” —Brian Hodge, Hellnotes

  “Golden has a talent for [creating] the most realistic characters you’re likely to find outside of a Stephen King novel.You care for these people and their well-being as much as you would for people you know. Golden has proven to be one of the great horror authors of our time. [His] works have impressed me in ways most horror novels can’t even approach. [The Ferryman] is horror in its purest form.” —Creature Corner

  And for the other novels of Christopher Golden...

  “Christopher Golden gradually brings into being a world of haunted and perilous fantasy which, while moving into greater solidity, never loses touch with its painful, sweet, embattled human context.... A beautiful and wildly inventive hymn to the most salvific human capacity: imagination.”

  —Peter Straub

  “A terrific novel. Excellent. An impressive achievement by a fine writer whose message could not be more timely. It’s the strength of Golden’s characters that gives this novel its power.” —Bentley Little

  “A daring and thoroughly engrossing blend of wonder and adventure, terror and tenderness.” —F. Paul Wilson

  “Enthralling....The imagination that it took to create this world—well, I am in awe of Christopher Golden.... You will weep. I did.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “Golden has taken the conventions of modern urban fantasy and the fondly remembered books of our childhood and come up with something wonderfully strange and new. [He] inject[s] the modern fantasy with some real imagination!” —Craig Shaw Gardner, author of Dragon Burning

  “A fascinating read. It deserves success.” —Cemetery Dance

  “With a sure voice and a steady hand, Golden weaves a story both deceptively simple and vibrantly realized, and he does it with pure artistry. I believe in his characters, his world, his talent.” —Greg Rucka, author of A Fistful of Rain

  “Golden makes the unbelievable quite believable. Compelling characters and the heart-wrenching horror of an endangered child combine for an inventive and engrossing page-turner.” —Paula Guran for DarkEcho

  “Harrowing, humorous, overflowing with plot contortions ... abundantly entertaining. A portent of great things to come.... A writer who cares passionately about the stuff of horror.”

  —Douglas E. Winter, editor of Revelations

  “[Golden’s] work is fast and furious, funny and original!”

  —Joe R. Lansdale, author of Lost Echoes

  “Just when you thought nothing new could be done with the vampire mythos, [Christopher Golden] comes along and shows us otherwise.”

  —Ray Garton, author of Live Girls and Dark Channel

  “Christopher Golden is an imaginative storyteller whose writing is both chilling and suspenseful.” —Philip Nutman, author of Wet Work

  “Golden has painted an intriguing canvas... filled with action, sweep, and dark mythology.” —Rex Miller, author of Slob and Chaingang

  “A breathtaking story that succeeds in marrying gore and romance, sex and sentiment. A brilliant epic.” —Dark News (Paris)

  “One of the best horror novels of the year. Filled with tension, breathtaking action, dire plots, and a convincing depiction of worlds existing unseen within our own. One of the most promising debuts in some time.”

  —Chronicle

  ROC

  Published by New American Library, a division of

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  Published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a Roc mass market edition.

  First Roc Trade Paperback Printing, September 2008

  Copyright © Christopher Golden, 2002

  eISBN : 978-0-451-46227-5

  Afterword copyright © Charles de Lint, 2008

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  The scanning, uploading, and distrib
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  For my children.

  Swim.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am grateful to so many for so much. First, of course, to my wife, Connie, and my children. The story echoes, but echoes fade.

  To my editor, Laura Anne Gilman, and my agent Lori Perkins.

  To Ginjer Buchanan, for giving this book a second life, and to Charles de Lint for his kind words and inspiration.

  To Joelle Corcoran, for talking about what it was like to almost die.

  To Hank Wagner and Bill Sheehan (and Connie again), all of whom read this novel in various stages and offered both enthusiasm and very helpful suggestions.

  To my family, those still with me and those long departed.

  And, at the last and always, to my friends, those who swim with me against the current and lend me their strength when I grow weary. I hope I do the same. I am grateful to all of you, and most especially to: Tom Sniegoski, Jose Nieto, Rick Hautala, Amber Benson, and Tim Lebbon.

  PROLOGUE

  It’s not a dream.

  On the banks of a broad, roiling river, Janine Hartschorn turned in a wild circle, searching for a familiar landmark, anything that might jog her memory, help her figure out where she was and how she had gotten here. Failing that, she’d have been happy to simply find a path that led away from the rushing water, a path to somewhere—anywhere—else.

  But Janine couldn’t see a damn thing.

  A thick, damp mist enshrouded her and spread its tendrils through the trees and across the river. If she looked straight up, she could see a few breaks in the fog, but she tried not to pay attention to them. If she did, she would have to think about the stars.The night sky seemed somehow closer here, wherever here was, and the stars that punctured the darkness were red like scarlet tears against the face of the night.

  Or wounds.

  They might have been wounds.

  Something brushed past her in the mist. Janine gasped and turned quickly to peer deeper into the damp shroud around her, but she could see nothing. A branch, perhaps. It might have been only a branch, yearning toward her under the press of the wind. But there was no wind.

  Her breathing quickened, yet each breath was shallower. Her eyes shifted in sudden spasms of paranoia as she gazed around her at each swirl of fog. Out there, within the cloud that lingered upon the marshy ground that squelched beneath her feet, someone watched her. Suddenly Janine was seven years old again, and her older brother and his friends had led her into the wood behind their house and left her, like Hansel and Gretel’s parents.They crouched snickering behind trees as she called out into the sunless forest.

  She called out now. “Hello? Who’s there?”

  Of course there was no answer.They would not confess their presence. The mist had texture, shadows within shadows, and she imagined she saw figures there, that she was being watched not by one but by many, and that they were all people who knew her. People who knew that every step forward put her in peril and yet urged her on regardless.

  She did not trust them, those shades and specters.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, though she could not have said why. “I can’t stay here. Can’t be with you. I have to—have to go.”

  Her feet had sunk so deeply into the mire that she found it difficult to move them. Once again she felt like a child, held against her will but capable only of whining and lashing out for her freedom.

  “Please,” she whispered.

  Tears like melting ice dripped down her cheeks, stinging her flesh. The taunting specters who lingered just beyond her vision only made her feel more lonely. More alone. She tore her right foot from the sucking mud, leaving one brown sandal behind. The other foot came loose more easily now, so that she wore only one shoe.

  Get your bearings, Janine, she told herself. And get out.

  She forced her breathing to slow, took long, hitching breaths and managed to calm her body down.

  The water. She had to get away from the water.

  Whatever was coming for her, haunting her in this dreadful, claustrophobic territory, it was coming across the water. Retreat was her only option. Janine turned and blindly walked into the mist.

  The sounds of the river receded behind her, and the wind rustled the leaves of the trees as she moved into denser woods. Branches swayed and seemed to dip across her path as if they were sentries warning her to turn back. But Janine did not turn back.

  The prickling of her skin began to subside, the dread to recede from her heart. Even the mist seemed thinner around her and the air blowing through the trees smelled fresh, without what she now realized was the fetid scent blowing off the river.

  At last the ground seemed firm beneath her feet, one bare and one still shod in brown leather. With a ponderous sigh of relief, Janine looked down to see that, even in the mist, she had begun to follow a path through the wood. Stones and roots jutted from the path, and yet it seemed familiar to her.

  Somewhere in the back of her mind, the child she had once been recognized that this was the path home.

  I was lost, she thought. Now I want to go home.

  With a smile and a shake of her head, Janine picked up her pace, unmindful of the hazards that might lie along the path for her one bare foot. A stubbed toe or a twisted ankle were a fair price for a bit of extra speed, for a single minute’s less time spent in this dark and dreary wood.

  Her smile evaporated. Something was not right.

  The river.

  It’s not behind me anymore.

  Somehow the sound of the river had migrated. It was off to her left now, rushing past rocks and burbling along the marshy shore. Once again, her breath came too fast and her heart began to skim along far too quickly. Janine shook her head and took a step backward. She cast a glance back the way she had come but knew it would be foolhardy to reverse direction. Only the river lay back that way ... and whatever it was that was coming for her.

  Pulling at her.

  Yes, she thought. That was the feeling she had been struggling to identify. The foreboding that filled her was not merely the presence of the thing but a kind of magnetic draw that seemed to drag at her limbs as she moved. She felt it pulling to her from the water, pulling her in.

  With no other choice, Janine pressed on. She had barely walked a dozen feet farther into the mist when her bare foot touched soft, damp earth that squished between her toes. The ground had given way to mire again.

  It turned, that’s all. It will turn again. I’m on a path. It must lead away from the river eventually.

  But as she walked on, her right leg plunged to the knee into blood-warm water, and she stumbled and nearly fell facefirst into the river.

  The path turned, that’s all.

  Holding her breath, Janine took a step back ... and found herself impossibly deeper than she had been a moment earlier. She spun, searching through the mist for the shore, but the river rushed all around her now and she could feel it pulling at her. The water had reached her waist and she felt its undercurrents caressing her skin, tracing the lines of her legs. It felt as though something tugged on her under there, and she batted at the water around her.

  Coins jangled in the loose pockets of her skirt, where the fabric had begun to float around her. Janine frowned.

  A light appeared on the water, tiny but growing larger, cutting toward her across the suddenly calm surface of the river.

  “No,” Janine whispered.

  A step backward only plunged her deeper, and she found herself turned round, facing the light again. Metal clanked against wood, and the light seemed to swing from side to side as it grew nearer.

  It was a boat. Narrower than a rowboat and roughly t
he length of a canoe, with a flickering lantern hung from its prow. No sail, no oars, nor even any rudder that she could see. The darkened figure that stood at the fore of the tiny boat made no effort to propel the vessel nor navigate its course.

  Janine bit her lower lip hard enough to draw blood, and she tasted its copper tang in her mouth. A step in any direction would only plunge her deeper into the river. She could not escape him.

  Come for her was the Ferryman.

  How she knew this was a mystery to her, but she did not question it. Inescapable fact loomed before her on the rippling surface of the river. Through the clearing mist she could see him now, draped in a scarlet hood and robe, a golden sash about his narrow waist. Beneath the hood his countenance was hidden, yet she imagined some horror beneath, some grotesque visage with burning eyes in skeletal orbits.

  The lantern clanked against the wooden boat. The light cast by the flame within skittered insectlike across the swirl of the river. Janine stood frozen, watching the Ferryman come. He stood as if hewn from granite upon the prow of the vessel, and reached up with narrow hands, thinly tapered fingers, and pulled back the cowl that had hidden his face.

  Janine gasped, only now remembering to breathe.

  The Ferryman’s flesh was pale and marbled and offset by his eyes, orbs of blackest indigo set into his thin face as if each of his pupils were its own full and devastating eclipse. His dark hair hung to his shoulders and his beard was lush, though pulled to a point some seven inches below his chin and bound with a metal ring.

  Not the grotesque she had feared. But chilling just the same.

  The ferry drifted to a stop perhaps a foot from where she stood, an island to herself in the river, and it floated no farther but instead remained there as if hovering just above the water.

  The eclipsed stars that were the eyes of the ashen creature turned upon her, and Janine felt for the first time that perhaps its desire for her to accompany it might not be an end to things but a beginning.Yet even as the thought dawned upon her, she also felt a new magnetism tugging at her from behind. Some other force had touched her, and it was powerful indeed.