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He knew so much about his mother. Her fears and hopes. Her quirks and habits. The foods she loved and those she detested. Her favorite music and her favorite books.

Yet he knew virtually nothing about his father, except that Thomas Edison had not killed him. Andrew wondered how much he was like Adolphe, what kind of man his father would be now, eleven years after his death. If Adolphe had not been shot, would he have suffered the chronic melancholy? Would he have the dark shadow in his soul, which had returned and sat hard now on his heart like it always had?

It hadn’t been difficult to get Edison to confess to the killing of his grandfather once the man was facing mortality. It hadn’t been hard to arrange for the right venue for the confession.

After leaving the tugboat, Andrew had gone home, waited until his mother went out, and slipped inside to dress and get enough money to pay for passage from Riverdale to West Orange, and two tickets from West Orange to Auburn, for a bit of food and room at a hotel for several days. He’d taken his moving picture camera with him, secured in its leather case.

Once he abducted Edison from Glenmont, he’d taken him aboard the northbound train under the guise of escorting a very drunk uncle back home. He’d kept Edison in an Auburn hotel, drugged with some vile fluid he bought on the street from a hustler. Then he found where the prison guards spent their nights off, a bar called Billy’s, and, with an offer of many free beers, quickly befriended the guard whose job it was to patrol the execution chamber.

Filming the hookers had given him control over them. He had no doubt it would do the same with the guard. And it had. Telling the guard that a film of him in his uniform would bring him fame and women, the guard cheerfully agreed.

That was all it took. Andrew then had access to the execution chamber and the chair, with the guard willingly watching the door and obeying his every word. Two weeks after Edison’s visit in the electric chair, he apparently was a changed, or at least partially changed, man. He’d put a statement out in the paper declaring how proud he was of all his inventions, that he’d never created nor wanted to create weapons that killed. He said, “Nonviolence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.”

This had caused Andrew to laugh aloud. It seemed Edison, as Shakespeare would have said, “doth protest too much.” Clearly the man was running from the devil as hard as he could, trying to make things right before death rushed up to claim him.

Andrea had welcomed him back home with consternation and weeping. She’d heard of his escape from Bellevue and had set the authorities looking for him. He’d learned that the doctor he stomped had not died but was recovered. An investigative team had interviewed Andrew, who explained that he’d been drugged and unable to think clearly. Didn’t they see the syringe in the cell? With that, the doctor’s case against him was dismissed. Andrea promised never to send him away again.

Andrew left the library for his room on the third floor, stepping carefully so as not to awaken the household. He heard the soft snoring of his mother on the second floor, and on the third he paused at the steps to the attic, listening up to the maid’s room for any sound of her stirring.

And the only stirring he was aware of was the shadow in his gut, coiled, heavy. Larger now than ever before. Alive. Aware. Waiting.

The house was silent except for the ticking grandfather clock in the hallway.

He went into his room, shut the door then turned toward his bed. There was a small box on it, a box he’d never seen before.

Glancing around to see if someone was there and finding no one, he eased down onto the mattress and lifted the box. It was made of thick tin, and secured with a tiny padlock. He tried to pry it open but it held fast. Then he saw a key on his nightstand.

Who had brought this to him? His mother? Someone else? He feared opening it and feared leaving it locked.

The key fit into the lock. The box creaked open.

Inside was a letter, the paper aged and soft. The words coded, and the message signed by “Adolphe Le Prince.”

Andrew studied the note slowly, carefully. Then he sat silently for a long while before putting the note back into the box and locking it. Standing, trembling, he went to his window and placed his hands up against the pane. He watched as the rising sunlight created a strange, ancient, indecipherable pattern around them.

And he heard the shadow in his soul laugh.

Turn the page for a sneak peek of

Raising Stony Mayhall
By Daryl Gregory

A zombie coming-of-age story which teaches all of us that even if you
hunger for brains, you’ve got to have heart.

Out now from Del Rey Books!

CHAPTER ONE

1968
Easterly, Iowa

t was a wonder she saw the dead girl at all. The first winter storm of the season had rolled in well ahead of the forecast, and Wanda Mayhall drove hunched over the wheel, squinting through a shrinking ellipse of clear windshield at a road being erased by drifts, and singing in a high, strong voice. The wind buffeted the Ford Falcon station wagon and threw snow across her headlights, making a screen of white static. She sang “I Will Meet You in the Morning,” a belter of a hymn that would keep her three girls from worrying.

And there, at the edge of the road, a dark lump on the white snow.

She thought it was a downed cow, or maybe a dog. Then, a moment after her headlights had swept past, she thought she’d seen a glimmer of yellow. Something about that wink of color made her think,
Rubber rain boots
.

She pressed on the brake as hard as she dared. Still the car slewed, and the two girls in the backseat squawked excitedly. Alice, her oldest at thirteen, braced herself against the dash and yelled, “Mom!” Ever since her father died, Alice had bestowed upon herself all the privileges of an adult, including the permanent right to ride shotgun and criticize her mother’s driving.

Wanda put the car in reverse and slowly backed up, her eyes watching the rearview mirror for headlights barreling out of the snow, until she reached the spot where she thought she’d seen the dark blot. She left the car running and the lights on. “Don’t get out of the car,” she told the girls.

She walked around to the rear of the station wagon. The wind whipped at her skirt, and icy snow bit her ankles through her nylons. Typical Iowa snowstorm, raking the empty fields at fifty miles per hour. A few feet from the taillights the dark closed in; she could barely distinguish gray field from pitch-black sky. She should have taken the flashlight from the glove compartment.

Then she saw the lump, perhaps ten feet from the road. She stepped off the shoulder and instantly plunged into snow up to her shins.

It was a girl, not more than seventeen or eighteen. She lay on her side, half buried in the snow, her arms curled in front of her. She wore an imitation rabbit fur coat, a dark skirt, black tights, and yes, yellow rubber boots. Wanda pulled off one glove and crouched in the snow beside her. She pushed the girl’s long brown hair from her face and touched a hand to her neck. Her skin was the same temperature as the snow.

A light illuminated them. “Is she dead?” Alice said. She held the big silver flashlight. Of course she’d remembered it; Alice was as levelheaded as her father had been.

“I told you to stay in the car,” Wanda said.

“Chelsea’s watching Junie. Who is she?”

Wanda didn’t recognize her. Maybe she was a runaway, trying to make it to Des Moines. But how did she get way out here, sixty miles from the city? And what killed her—exposure? A hit-and-run driver?

The girl’s arms were wrapped around her stomach. Wanda had a bad thought. She put her hand on the girl’s shoulder and tried to push her onto her back, but only moved her a few inches; a drift had formed against her, holding her in place. Wanda pulled on the girl’s arm—it felt heavy, but not stiff—and moved it down to her side. Then she tugged up the hem of the jacket.

The infant was wrapped in what looked like bath towels. Only its tiny gray face was visible, its eyes closed, its lips blue. Wanda made a low, sad sound. She worked her hands beneath the child, her hand cradling its neck, and brought it to her chest. It was cold, cold as its mother.

Alice moved closer to her, and Wanda put up a hand—the girl didn’t need to see this. The dead girl’s pale shirt and dark skirt were stiff with frozen blood. Her black tights, she realized, were crusted with it.

Alice stepped forward anyway, frowning. She didn’t scream, didn’t panic. She looked at the girl, then the baby in her mother’s arms, and said, “We have to get them to the hospital.”

“Oh, honey,” Wanda said. She’d witnessed a few kinda-sorta miracles in her years as an RN, but there was no hospital on earth that could help this baby now. She held it to her and got to her feet. Then she carried it back to the station wagon. Alice said, “Shouldn’t we bring the girl?”

“We’ll come back for her,” Wanda said. The mother she could leave, but she couldn’t imagine abandoning an infant, even a dead one.

When they reached the car she made Alice get in first, then put the baby in her arms, as gently as if it were a living child. The younger girls leaned over the seat back, amazed. “You found a
baby
?” Chelsea said. She was seven years old, Junie only three and a half. Alice said, “It’s not—”

“Sit in your seats, all of you,” Wanda said, cutting her off. The last thing she needed was three hysterical girls. She wouldn’t allow herself to cry, either.

She eased the station wagon into the lane. In all the time they’d been pulled over not a car had passed them in either direction. The closest telephone was their own, a couple of miles away. She’d have to call the police, or maybe the fire department, and tell them where to find the girl.

Then Alice shouted and Wanda nearly slammed on the brakes. “Alice, you can’t—”

“Mom!”

The baby’s eyes were open.

After a moment Wanda said, “That happens sometimes.” She used her nurse voice. Maybe Alice would believe her if she used the nurse voice.

“It’s
moving,”
Alice said.

One of the towels had come open, exposing a little gray hand. Wanda looked at the road, back to the child. Its tiny fingers flexed.

Wanda felt a stab of panic. Suddenly she had a dying newborn to save. She couldn’t floor it; the Falcon would never stay on the road. “Hold him up to the heater,” she said. “Her. It.”

The ten minutes to the farm seemed to take forever. The baby’s arms shifted feebly under its wrap, and its lips moved silently. Alice talked to it the way she talked to Junie after a bad dream: Don’t you worry, little one. Don’t you cry.

Wanda drove up the lane and didn’t bother to put the car in the garage. She killed the engine and took the baby from Alice. “Help the girls out,” she said.

“Chelsea, carry Junie in,” Alice said, and followed her mother into the house. With one hand Wanda plugged the kitchen drain and turned on the warm water. The baby looked into her face. Its eyes were the color of clouds before a heavy rain.

“We have to treat it for hypothermia,” Alice said.

Wanda had long ago ceased to be surprised by the things Alice knew. “That’s right. Now go get me some towels.”

Wanda unwrapped the child. Ah, a boy then. He was blue-gray from top to bottom, with a black umbilical cord a couple of inches long, and a tiny gray penis. Dark hair with a bit of curl to it. She stirred the water in the sink, decided it would do, then lowered him into it.

Chelsea dragged over a kitchen chair so she could see. Junie climbed up with her and wrapped her arms around her sister’s waist. “We should name him,” Chelsea said.

“He’s not ours to name,” Wanda said.

The boy seemed to like the water. He kicked his legs, waved his arms. He still hadn’t made a sound. Then she realized that his chest wasn’t moving. No: hadn’t moved. The boy wasn’t breathing. Junie reached out to touch him. “Get down, girls,” Wanda said. “Down!”

She’d never been this scared caring for a patient. She decided she had to treat his hypothermia and breathing at once, so she cradled him in the water with one hand and pinched shut his little nostrils with the other. Then she bent her lips to his. Gentle, she thought. New lungs were fragile.

She puffed a bit of air into his mouth. His chest rose a fraction, dropped—and stayed down. She breathed into him again, and again. After a minute she put her fingers to his neck. No pulse.

He gazed up at her with those cloud-colored eyes, perfectly calm. His hand came up, seemed to reach for her face. And in that moment she made her decision. If it was a decision. If she had any choice at all.

“Mom?” Alice said. “Is he okay? You want me to call the hospital?”

“No. No hospital.” Alice started to argue, and Wanda said, “They’re snowed in. Nobody could get here anyway. Please, put the girls to bed.”

Alice managed to get the girls into their pajamas, but none of them would stay out of the kitchen. They watched as Wanda worked, and soon she was sweating like a long-distance runner. After a half hour the baby was no better and no worse for all the forced resuscitation. In fact he seemed to like it. The air she gave him he turned into gurgles and sighs and whines. His first sounds.