Rise the Dark Read Online Free PDF

would look into her eyes—they were blue but shielded with dark contacts—and nod with amazement because whatever generality she tossed at them connected with something in their pasts. They made the connections themselves, but they credited her for it. And paid for the joke.
    It was this experience that had left Mark with scorn for the people who practiced their games in a place like this, and it was that scorn that led his wife to take an assignment that had been headed for his desk and claim it as her own. The interview with Dixie Witte had been Mark’s job. Lauren didn’t think he’d be able to approach it with sincerity, thought that he was biased against anyone who claimed psychic gifts, and so she’d interceded and come to Cassadaga herself.
    Never left.
    Thunder, long and loud, chased Mark as he walked away from the hotel and through the camp. The air was thick with humidity and scented with jasmine and honeysuckle. There was only one paved street, the road that ran through the center of the camp, and the rest of the homes were built off narrow lanes of crushed stone and hard-packed earth. The lanes were framed by tall oaks that were cobwebbed with Spanish moss.
    It was a strange little place. Some of the homes were neat and well kept, recently restored in a few cases, and others looked like they’d been built by someone using the wrong end of the hammer. Mark walked by a man who was doing clean and jerks with a barbell and a pair of forty-five-pound plates in the middle of his front yard. He was shirtless and had a thick mat of black hair across his chest and stomach, shining with sweat, and he called out the reps in a grunting voice as he powered the weights up. Who needs a gym when you’ve got a front yard? Or a shirt when you could grow your own? Ten feet to his side, chickens clucked and scratched their way around a coop that had been made out of an old truck’s camper shell. The local power-lifter seemed to be of the waste-not, want-not mind-set.
    Each street sign included a bold white 911 inside a green circle. Mark had never seen anything like it. The idea probably had something to do with giving emergency services a firm address on roads that had previously been unmarked or unnamed, but the effect was disconcerting, seeming to cry out that a disaster waited down each winding lane.
    Mr. Novak? I’m afraid I have some difficult news to share. It’s about your wife.
    The deputy who’d come for him that night, who’d found Mark waiting at the Siesta Key beach house where he and Lauren were supposed to have a romantic weekend escape, had never heard of Cassadaga. That night, Mark had heard of it only from his wife.
    Since then, he’d spent much of his time in the place, in mind if not in body.
    Mr. Novak? I’m afraid I have some difficult news to share. It’s about your wife.
    The day after their engagement, Lauren’s father had invited Mark over for a beer, just the two of them. Mark was expecting the typical “Now, you take good care of my baby girl” speech, and while he received a version of it, he wasn’t prepared for the depth of pain in the other man’s eyes. It was the first time he’d understood the fear that lived like a heartbeat within a parent. A good parent, at least.
    “Having a child,” Lauren’s father had said, “is to spend your life swimming with sharks. You think I’m joking, but it’s only because you don’t know yet. You haven’t seen one grow up and walk off into the world, and when you do, you’ll think about all the things that could be waiting out there; you’ll think of car accidents and cancer and kidnappings and all the other horrors in a way you didn’t before you had a child. You always knew they were out there, but you didn’t care in the same way. Then you have a daughter, and…well, then you see the sharks. They’ll start circling in your mind, and they’ll never leave. You’ll just pray they keep circling forever. You understand what I’m