Beckon

But more importantly, would he ever find it again?

He looked back at Elina and gave a faint smile. “I think maybe he did.”

Then a thought struck him. “Wait a minute.” He began to dig furiously through the boxes, searching the dates until he located the right one. He looked up at Elina. “Twelve years ago.”

Elina’s eyebrows went up. “You think there’s something about your dad in there?”

Jack flipped through the notebook, his hands nearly trembling, following the dates until he discovered the one he was looking for. Part of him hoped he would find something—some clue or mention to help him gain closure. To know at last what had happened. But part of him hoped he wouldn’t.

Then Jack froze as his eyes fell across his father’s name. His heart was beating so fast he could barely read it.

“He was here,” Jack said. “Vale lied to me.”

“Of course he lied,” Elina said. “He wanted to keep his little operation here a secret.”

Jack scanned the pages. They had indeed captured his father. He had come upon the town and was asking questions. Asking for directions to the nearby Caieche reservation. Not suspecting a thing.

Jack fought back his emotions. “He… he never even made it to the reservation.”

He read further as Dwight detailed how they had held his father captive in Vale’s compound on the hill. Vale had hoped to utilize his knowledge to study the N’watu for his own advantage. Vale was, after all, a prisoner of the lost tribe like everyone else. And he was searching desperately for some clue to the secret of the perilium. A way to concoct it for himself. They held Jack’s father there for several months, giving him limited access to part of the caves and allowing him to study the tribe at some length. Even to meet Nun’dahbi herself. No doubt his father had seen the woman’s amulet even as Jack had. The artifact that appeared to have been so important in his father’s other notes. Jack read until he came to a section that sent chills down his back.

One day his father had attempted an escape and fled into the woods. Dwight detailed how Carson and the others had tracked him down. They used dogs and hunted him. Cornered him like an animal. But his father was not going to give up easily. There was a struggle, and…

And shots were fired.

Carson acknowledged that Kendrick had left him little choice. In the end, the man was simply not willing to cooperate, and while his elimination was regrettable, he was too great a risk to keep alive any longer. And Vale has never been one to risk much.

Jack stared at the words on the page. The account had been written with such clinical detachment. Almost as if they had put down a rabid dog and not a human being.

He wept as Dwight described how they had hauled his father’s dead body into the cave to be fed to the kiracs.

But there was something else.

Dwight also indicated that he had retained the research journal Jack’s father had kept in hopes of eventually finding something useful. He wrote that he had hidden it under the floorboards inside the closet.

Jack went back to the closet and knelt down to inspect the floor. One of the boards was indeed loose and rattled beneath Jack’s hand.

His heart was pounding as he pried it up, surging with the same emotions he’d felt when he first discovered the hidden compartment in his father’s desk.

Under the floorboard was a thick notebook covered in dust. Jack lifted it out and blew the dirt off. He opened it and felt as if his heart would burst through his ribs. On the inside cover, written in faded ink, was a name.

David C. Kendrick

He held up the book. “It’s his journal!”

Jack thumbed through the pages and found that the entries went back several years before his father’s disappearance. They appeared to chronicle most of his expeditions. Some of it was written in English, but other parts were in Latin. Some in Greek and even some in what looked like Hebrew. But parts of the last several pages were written in…

Jack peered closer. The writing used the same characters he had seen inside the caves. He looked up at Elina, not knowing whether to scream or laugh or cry. A thousand emotions clamored for dominance. He couldn’t wait to pore over the pages of the book. To find out what secrets it might hold. And what answers. He rocked back on his knees, clutching the journal to his chest as though it were his father himself.

They left the office and stepped out onto the street. Jack held the old journal tight under his arm. Down the street he saw Malcolm’s rust-colored pickup parked at the filling station on the edge of town. George Wilcox stood beside it, pumping gas.

Elina waved and shouted, “George!”

“So you made it out of there,” George said as they ran up.

“Barely.” Jack looked up at the shadowy lodge perched at the top of the bluff. “What about the others?”

“Most of them are dead. Or dying. I watched Vale die myself. Just after I told him I had flushed the last of his precious perilium down the toilet.”

Elina peered into the garage windows. “They’ve got my car almost completely disassembled in there.”

“Yeah, mine too,” George said.

Elina shook her head. “They had their own chop shop set up to hide the evidence.”

George pointed to the fenced-in yard behind the station, overgrown with weeds. “They must turn them into scrap metal and stick them out back.”

Jack noticed a large bundle of linen lying in the bed of the pickup. It looked like a body wrapped in sheets.

“Is… is this your…?”

“My wife, Miriam,” George said, putting his hand on the sheet. “I brought her here to try to save her life, but she…” His voice cracked with emotion. “But she ended up saving mine. I’m going to bring her home for a decent burial.”

“Would you mind giving us a ride?” Jack said. “I have an old RV that should still be parked a few miles away.”

George gestured to the cab. “Hop in.”

They climbed into the truck, and as George pulled back onto the road, Jack noticed the old wooden sign at the edge of town.

Welcome to Beckon. You’re not here by chance.

And it struck him just then how true it was.

About the Author

Jump in. Hang on.

Tom Pawlik is the highly imaginative, Christy Award–winning author of Vanish, Valley of the Shadow, and Beckon. His thought-provoking, edge-of-your-seat thrillers are infused with nonstop suspense that grabs you on the first page and won’t let go until the last.

Tom’s fascination with the weird, the creepy, and the unknown began at a very early age when he was introduced to a nineteenth-century storybook called Der Struwwelpeter—a collection of nightmarish morality tales by a German physician who obviously had too much time on his hands. The Mother Goose–meets–Stephen King nursery rhymes included “Daumenlutscher” (“Thumbsucker”), a disturbing yarn about a