Hiding Place by Penny Maez
A chilling novel of claustrophobia, revelation, and revenge. Confined together deep underground, its characters become the target of their own escalating fears. As each man reveals more of his past, the horror mounts, the walls close in, and they begin to realize that they’re not alone.
THE PERFECT CRIME JUST BECAME THE PERFECT NIGHTMARE.
After the rape and murder of his girlfriend Sarah in a Boston back street, Peter Vernon has fallen into bad company. Tonight he’s part of an armed robbery that targeted a religious rally at Fenway Park. The crime couldn’t be easier: grab the money from the backroom, make it to the long-deserted subway station at Barrow Hall, await further instructions.
But further instructions never come. The six men, cold, frightened, burning nervous energy and fueled by the alcohol left them for their stay, begin turning on each other, bickering, fighting, fingering their guns. Vernon, the youngest and least experienced of the team, finds himself outmatched by the ruthless career criminals he’s holed up with.
The tension is destructive enough. But then the station lights begin to flicker, and there are unexplainable noises from deeper in the abandoned tunnel.
For Peter Vernon, and for all the others, this is a night that might never end.
51,000 words : 176 pages
eBook
Amazon search code: B00II3YXIQ
Buy at Amazon US : $6.99 (free on Kindle unlimited)
Buy at Amazon UK : £5.99 (free on Kindle unlimited)
Paperback
Amazon search code: 1520816979
Buy at Amazon US : $10.99
Buy at Amazon UK : £9.99
EXCERPT
Lamb and McCarthy had gone ahead without waiting. I assumed they no longer cared what happened to us. I could see them, about half way down a passage that stretched off from the doorway at least twenty meters, trying one of the doors.
There were doors on either side, all of them shut, all of them with cryptic signs in old fashioned plaques, none offering anything but the mundane refuse of a boarded-up past.
They were trying every one and then moving on, cataloging a series of dead ends. To the left, one of the doors must open on the chamber we could see through the grill, or on a room that connected through to it. From there a stairway would take us up to the platform above, should we choose to climb it.
But the point was not to find an exit. It was to find ourselves barricaded. We didn’t want a door that led out to the exit. We wanted a doorway that had been bricked up, and hence posed us no threat.
Behind us I heard the staff room door banging again, clattering against the metal back of the coin locker cabinet. I wondered if we would need to retreat, one door at a time, one barricade at a time, all the way back to whatever lay at the rear of this passage.
Wood stood in front of me, his lantern lifted, looking beyond me into the dark room at my rear.
‘Can you still sense it?’ he asked.
I shook my head. There was still pain in my jaw, and a wowing sense of dislocation in my mind. I couldn’t sense a thing.
Abruptly I became aware of Lamb, backing silently across the passage. McCarthy had disappeared. He must be through the door they’d just opened. He must be in there, waiting.
But Lamb’s lantern was shaking. The light flickered across his face, revealing his wide, staring eyes, the terror that framed his thin, unsmiling mouth. His back bumped into the wall opposite the doorway and stuck there.
The only sound was the rattling of the door we’d blocked, two rooms away behind us.
‘We go back?’ I hissed at Wood.
He seemed transfixed too, staring up the corridor at Lamb. At the open doorway opposite Lamb. At whatever Lamb was gazing in upon.
Of course we couldn’t go back. We were trapped between the sound at our rear and the horror in front.
All at once Lamb seemed to find himself. He threw down the lantern and ran headlong down the passage. The lantern smashed on the tiled floor, erupting into a wall of flame that burned purple and blue, raced upward to the ceiling, yellowing and smoking, and snuffed out. The paraffin smell reached me seconds later.
Lamb had flung himself at the door at the end of the passage and was ramming it with his shoulder, trying desperately to break through.
As the ignited fuel burned out, I became aware of another light, a soft bluish glow that issued from the open doorway and fanned out into the corridor.
I took a step toward it. Wood reached out and grabbed my arm but I shrugged him off silently.
Lamb’s door gave way. He fell forward into darkness and slammed it shut behind him. A moment later I heard his scream, as if all the horror of what he’d witnessed was finally expelled from him.
I took another step toward the doorway.
The blue glow wrapped around me, carried me forward.
The chamber beyond the door was some kind of washroom. It had stained white tile walls and brown glaze on the floor. There were dirty washbasins along one side and toilet stalls on the other.
McCarthy was standing in the center of the room, rigid, as if frozen in time. He was face to face with something else, something blue and bright and glowing and horrifying, something that gaped back at him, mouth to mouth, eye to eye. Its substance seemed to blur and merge, like layers of underwater lights shifting and dancing. Its face was the face of something half drowned and half burned, something strangled, something carved with a knife. Its face was all the dead, and it had its full attention on McCarthy, who was powerless to move or to break the grip of those sightless white eyes.
I started to move forward into the chamber.
Wood gripped me again.
‘No, Peter. Stay back.’
The thing — the apparition, the demon, whatever it was — turned its head toward me. I gasped under the onslaught of its gaze.
McCarthy, released, fell backwards. His gun whirled up.
The thing’s face erupted, exploding outwards in all directions as if it had suddenly grown a thousand times larger. In the moment it expanded, it seemed to lose what little substance it had had. It ripped apart into filigree strands, turned to a dark smoke, and disappeared.
Wood’s lantern light thrust into the room, turning it to a glare of sickening yellow from the moldering walls and fouled, graffiti-strewn stalls.
McCarthy was still standing there, his gun gripped before him.
He turned it on me. I flinched to one side. But McCarthy wasn’t going to shoot.
I saw him composing himself, nerve ending by nerve ending, organizing himself back into his body.
‘So much for your nuts and bolts universe,’ Wood said quietly.
51,000 words : 176 pages
eBook
Amazon search code: B00II3YXIQ
Buy at Amazon US : $6.99 (free on Kindle unlimited)
Buy at Amazon UK : £5.99 (free on Kindle unlimited)
Paperback
Amazon search code: 1520816979
Buy at Amazon US : $10.99
Buy at Amazon UK : £9.99
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