Happy Halloween!

A creepy tidbit from Mercy: The Last New England Vampire to give you the shivers today!

Our heroine, Haley, and her new friend/potential love interest/eager monster hunter companion, Alan, are exploring the house of a suspected vampire. Here’s what they find:

Chilly and dim. Filtered through shades and curtains, light couldn’t fill up the rooms, which loomed like caves, the old-fashioned furniture half-lost in shadow.

“Whoa.” Alan looked around appreciatively. “Very atmospheric. Very Stephen King.”

Everywhere, the familiar earthy smell teased at her nose. Cold and heavy and damp. The smell of wet clay—the smell of the grave. It seemed to cling to the air.

And no one was there.

Hallway, living room, dining room—all were empty. She’d never realized before how loud most houses were. A refrigerator humming, a furnace rumbling to life, pipes clanking, a floorboard creaking, a loose window rattling in its frame. None of that here. Haley could hear the air moving in and out of her nose. She could hear Alan breathing at her elbow. She could hear herself swallow.

Alan pushed open a swinging door in the pantry. After a moment his voice broke the silence. Even his low murmur seemed shockingly loud. Haley wanted to scream at him to shut up. She nearly clamped a hand over her own mouth to keep herself from doing it.

“Haley, look.”

For a change, he sounded serious.

Haley came to look over his shoulder. The kitchen. A bare wooden table, scrubbed clean, stood in the center of the room. The cupboards were closed, the counters empty.

A cold breeze seemed to wreathe itself around Haley, caressing her neck, whispering down her spine.

“See?”

“See what?” The room looked perfectly normal to Haley. Well, oddly clean, definitely. Even unused. But empty, that was the main point. Where was Aunt Brown?

“There’s no refrigerator.” Alan took a few steps into the room to open some of the cupboards. Bowls and plates. Cups and saucers. All clean and chilly and white. Haley couldn’t help thinking of bones, gnawed clean and stacked tidily away.

Alan turned back to look at Haley. “No food. There’s no food anywhere.”

Suddenly he didn’t seem to think that vampire hunting was so much fun after all. Haley shuddered. Strangely, the bare kitchen seemed more scary than anything else—than the dark figure in Jake’s apartment, than the message in the dust, than the heartbeat from the grave. It was so—real. So ordinary. So everyday. So wrong.