The Woods Are Dark

The version you’re about to read was the one that was first submitted to Warner Books and blurbed by Dean Koontz and Gary Brandner. (And, to keep that righting of wrongs going, those blurbs can be found on this very edition!)

Those of you who have read the Warner edition will notice that the two books are very different after, say, chapter eight or so.

How did I do it? Especially since my father said it couldn’t be done?

I’m not sure. It was all there. But the pieces weren’t in the same place.

There were boxes of thirty-year-old manuscripts and I had played with the various drafts many times over the last six or seven years. I always believed it could be done. I sure had false starts though. I had to get to know each draft of the manuscript. Not by the content of the pages, but by the pages themselves. I evaluated them based on page numbering styles and other forms of continuity. I didn’t want to read any draft until I had settled on what I believed was the true manuscript.

And, of course, all the drafts of The Woods Are Dark were complete and in order except for what turned out to be the true version, which was split up in three different places.

I ended up with two piles of pages. One was the original Lander Dills chapters. (Those were once collected in a small-press chapbook.) The other was the original manuscript, which was missing a lot of pages. Those gaps perfectly matched the deleted Lander Dills pages. The chapters and page numbers all lined up. It was like shuffling two halves of a deck of cards. It all came together. I declared it done, read it, and began typing the book for this Leisure release. As I suspected, it held up. No gaps in story, continuity, or logic

I had one little problem though. I couldn’t find pages 264 or 265. I had the whole novel and the final page, but the third- and second-to-last pages were missing.

Was this just a case of faulty page numbering? Everything came together perfectly. Maybe those two pages were meant to be blank? However, it was obvious that those pages had to contain the conclusion of the Lander Dills tale. It was the only unresolved issue. I checked the chapbook of deleted The Woods Are Dark scenes. No dice. There was no conclusion to that plotline in there either.

Were they lost forever? Is that why my father said it could never be done?

I sat down with the boxes of manuscripts one last time. I had no idea what I was going to do if I came up with nothing. And I really didn’t care to think about having to burn that bridge. Then, at the bottom of the box containing the handwritten draft I found a typewritten page. It was page 264 and it said “Epilogue” at the top. The first line had Lander singing a carefree little song. The page behind it was 265 and wrapped up Lander’s story.

I was so relieved that I laughed and then cried a little. It was done. A wrong had been left to sit for just under thirty years. It was written before I was born and submitted less than six months after my birth. I was just a baby when the whole thing blew up, but heard the story told many times during his life.

I certainly hope this wasn’t a giant exercise in failure. I hope the longtime fans enjoy this original version as much as (or more than!) the one they’ve previously been exposed to. And I hope that the newer fans enjoy this so much that they’re never curious enough to seek out the Warner edition on eBay. But if I failed miserably at this, if it was never meant to be done, that sure would be the next logical step in the saga of this book.

CHAPTER ONE

Neala O’Hare slowed her MG as the narrow road curved. The evening sun was no longer behind her. Shadows of the high trees threw their dark capes across the road, hiding it. She pulled off her sunglasses.

Sherri, beside her, suddenly gasped.

Neala saw it, too. She hit the brakes.

Her friend thrust a hand against the windshield as the car jerked to a stop.

In front of them, the legless thing dragged itself over the road with powerful, hairy arms.

“What the fuck is it?” Sherri muttered.

Neala shook her head.

Then it faced them.

Nealas hands clenched the steering wheel. Stunned, she tried to figure out what she was seeing. It hardly looked like the face of a man.

The thing turned. It started to drag itself toward the car.

“Get out of here!” Sherri cried. “Quick! Back up!”

“What is it?” Neala asked.

“Let’s go!”

Neala backed up, but slowly, just enough to keep away from the approaching creature. She couldn’t take her eyes off its bloated face.

“Run it over!” Sherri snapped.

She shook her head. “I can’t. It’s a man. I think it’s a man.”

“Who cares? For Godsake, run it over and let’s get the fuck out of here!”

It sat up, balancing on its torso, freeing its arms. It leered at Neala.

“Oh God,” Sherri muttered.

It fumbled at an opening in its furry vest. A pocket? It pulled out a severed human hand, kissed its palm, and tossed it. The hand flipped toward Neala. She ducked her head, felt it in her hair, and knocked it aside. It fell into the gap between the bucket seats.

The legless thing scuttled off the road and disappeared into the forest.

Neala looked down at the hand, at its crooked fingers, its coral-painted nails, the white band of skin where a wedding ring used to be. Lunging sideways, she threw herself over her door and vomited onto the pavement. When she was done, she turned to her friend.

“We’ve gotta get rid of it,” Sherri said.

“I…”

Snarling as if enraged, Sherri clutched the hand by its fingers and flung it from the car. “God!” She rubbed her hand furiously on her shorts.

Neala sped away.

As she drove, her mind repeated the incident again and again. She needed to make sense of it, but no matter how she concentrated, it wouldn’t fall into a pattern she could accept. The scene belonged in a nightmare, not on a peaceful road on the way to Yosemite.

She was glad to see a town ahead—not much of a town, to be sure. Up in these areas, though, they never were.

“Maybe they’ve got a police department,” she said.

“You’re not planning to stop!”

“We ought to tell someone.”

“Tell Father Higgins, for Godsake. Save it for confession. Jesus, let’s get the hell out of here.”

“We can’t just forget about it.”

“Forget about it? Every time I shut my eyes, I’m going to be looking into that repulsive, gloating…” Sherri jerked her head sharply as if to shake the picture apart. “God, I’m never gonna forget about it. But we don’t have to go around making a big deal of it, okay? Let’s just keep it to ourselves. It’s water over the dam, you know?”

They had already left half the town behind. Ahead of them, Neala saw a bait shop, Terk’s Diner, and the Sunshine Motor Inn.

“Why don’t we stop at the diner?” Neala suggested.

“Why don’t we not?”

“Come on. It’s almost seven. We could both use some supper.”

“You mean you can eat after that?”

“I can try. I’d sure like to get out of the car and relax, at least. Try to think it out. Talk it over. Besides, there’s no telling when we’ll hit another restaurant.”