Nat Cassidy, author of the acclaimed horror Mary, returns with When the Wolf Comes Home, an unabashed, adrenaline-fueled pop horror thriller where the darkest fears can become reality.
One night, Jess, a struggling actress, finds a five-year-old runaway hiding in the bushes outside her apartment. After a violent, bloody encounter with the boy's father, she and the boy find themselves running for their lives.
As they attempt to evade the boy's increasingly desperate father, Jess slowly comes to a horrifying understanding of the butchery that follows them—the boy can turn his every fear into reality.
And when the wolf finally comes home, no one will be spared.
Excerpt
Daddy is roaring. Howling. Destroying everything in the house—furniture, pictures on the wall, all of it—while he searches for the boy.
The boy is crouched inside the pantry. Hidden. For now.
Hardnoise, he thinks in his terror, flinching at the sounds of destruction. He’s seen Daddy angry plenty of times before . . . but not like this. This is so much worse than all the other times.
“How?!” Daddy demands in a deep, raspy voice. “Where?!” It sounds as if the words rip out of him, pulling bits of throat along the way. “Where . . . ind . . . I-i-t?”
The boy—who is only five years old and small for his age—shrinks farther inside the pantry. He thinks about disappearing completely, but knows he can’t. The thing he’s clutching to his chest keeps him moored to the world. The thing Daddy is raging about.
The book.
Lately, the boy had been sneaking out a window while Daddy took his afternoon naps. He knew it wasn’t allowed, that it’s Bad and Dangerous, but he hadn’t been able to stop himself. The call of the outside world was too great, and for all his rules and precautions, Daddy hadn’t yet realized the boy figured out how to open the window.
Daddy’s naps are always the same time and the same length every day, so the boy never went far on these walks. Usually, he just stood and looked around for a bit before scrabbling back inside. He looked at the other houses. At the cars driving by. The little rocks with bits of sparkle in them. The trees. A lizard. A stray cat. Things he’d seen or heard from the other side of the window, usually accompanied by Daddy’s dry, detailed explanations of what they were looking at. “So you never have to wonder,” Daddy always said.
But it was so much nicer to experience them. So much more exciting to wonder. A few days ago, the boy let himself walk down the block a little, and that’s when he’d discovered the tiny house. It was in a neighbor’s front yard: a tiny house on a short pole. The tiny house had a little glass door, and inside . . . was all books. If the boy could read, he still might not have known what the phrase Little Library meant, but he thought the teal calligraphic squiggles were pretty.
The boy didn’t own any books, but he’d seen plenty. Daddy liked to read.
Except, his books were all dull, uninteresting things. Flat colors, no pictures, blocks of tiny words inside. The boy had never seen books like these.
Some were soft and floppy, with glossy pictures on their covers. Some were sturdier, and their covers even slipped off, revealing the blank, hard covers the boy was more familiar with.
One book in particular stole his attention.
Old. Worn. Hardbound, but its peach-colored cover wasn’t blank; it had shiny gold lettering and pictures stamped into it. This book had been loved, the boy knew somehow.
The inside was also full of pictures. Beautiful, full-color, richly detailed pictures, some taking up one or even two whole pages. A boy and a girl finding a house made out of candy. A girl asleep in a bed full of flowers. Another girl with fish fins instead of legs. The boy didn’t understand any of these images—he’d never heard a fairy tale, had never seen a picture book—but he was captivated.
He didn’t know a book could ever be like this.
He’d been out too late—had sensed the time slipping away like a physical thing—so he hurried home with the book in tow, making it back into his room just in time before Daddy woke up. He hid the book, his book, under his mattress, peeking at it very rarely and very briefly, whenever he was certain Daddy wouldn’t catch him. He only looked at one picture at a time. Savoring it. Cherishing it. Trying to imagine the words that might go with such fantastical pictures. He didn’t even feel the need to sneak out the window anymore. The book was his window now.
Until one day he flipped to the wrong picture. A large, hulking wolf stalking through an endless forest. The wolf had oily dark fur, a long, pointy snout, pulling back to reveal rotting gums and massive teeth dripping with foamy drool. Its claws were massive, perfectly sharp and curly, and made for tearing into soft, little-boy flesh.
The picture scared the boy. Scared him in a way he’d never been scared before. He couldn’t shake it. He had to keep looking at it. It seemed to give a shape, a face, to every fear he’d ever had, as if this wolf had been waiting for him all along in the shadows.
Every time he looked at his book, he went straight to that picture. Compelled. Hypnotized. Like prey.
He was staring at it this morning, when Daddy caught him.
Daddy got so angry, seeing what the boy was doing. He began to yell and stomp and demand answers. He threw the book. He shook the boy. Which only scared the boy further.
And now . . .
Another howl tears through the silence.
“WHERE—?! STOP THIS!”
The boy hears heavy footsteps storm farther into the house, searching for him.
Go now, he thinks. Run.
Don’t, he also thinks. Stay hidden.
But Daddy will check the kitchen eventually. And when he does . . .
Remember the other boy!
That gets him moving. The other boy. His only friend.
The boy has to leave. At least for a little while. So Daddy can calm down. He carefully opens the pantry door. Daddy is gone, destroying other rooms in his search for the boy, but the devastation in his wake . . . The kitchen table, smashed into bits. The walls, ravaged and slashed. Holes punched in the plaster. Shreds of fabric everywhere.
For a moment, the boy is frozen, taking it all in.
The air is hot. Heavy. Smelling like food left burning on the stovetop. Like that time Daddy ruined dinner and got so mad and the boy got scared and—
More hardnoise from the other room—Smash! Crash! Howl! No time.
Still clutching his book, the boy tiptoes his way to the front door. Too many things on the floor to trip over and make noise. It takes all his balance and concentration to not—
Snap!
The boy inhales with a hiss. A framed picture. Daddy and Mommy smiling. The boy has stepped on the thin wood of the frame and cracked it.
The hardnoise in the other room stops.
Daddy. Listening.
The front door is suddenly yards away. Miles. Impossible to reach from here. Too late. The boy ducks behind the overturned coffee table. Makes himself small, as small as he can, and squeezes his eyes shut. Maybe if he can’t see Daddy, Daddy can’t see—
A hand closes over his ankle.
“FOUND YOU.”
The boy is pulled out and up. As if he’s insubstantial as air.
He opens his eyes to find himself dangling upside down, staring at eyes burning with senseless anger. Lips pulled back in a sneer. Breath as hot as an oven’s. Frothy drool seething between clenched teeth.
He barely recognizes the face.
No, no, no!
The boy squeezes his eyes shut again. He remembers another picture in his book. A hero, brandishing something long and sharp in the face of some firebreathing, scaly thing. In that desperate instant, the boy imagines he holds a similar weapon and brings his book down, hard as he can, onto the hairy arm holding him. He feels the solid resistance of bone.
Daddy yelps.
The boy hits the carpet in a tooth-rattling thud. He wastes no time, scrambles toward the front door, not caring how much noise he makes now. He doesn’t let himself worry that the door might be locked, or the knob too high, or his palms too slippery. Still holding the book under one arm, he wrenches the door open and sprints into the night. His bare feet slap against pavement and asphalt.
From inside the house, Daddy’s cries change from pain to anger again.
“GET BACK HERE!”
The boy ignores his father’s commands. He runs and runs. Daddy will be behind him any second, so he heads for back ways, through bushes and culverts, ignoring sharp gravel, hoping his small size helps him disappear.
“GET BACK HERE!”
Daddy’s voice, fainter now. The huge world, swallowing up sound the farther the boy runs.
But the memories of hardnoise still crash in his ears.
And the taste of fear never leaves his mouth.
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