CHAPTER 9
Henry Ridge had been on the road for nearly a week.
Travelling from his home in Chavez County, New Mexico, roaming under endless indigo skies and across the vast emptiness of the Southwest, in his two-tone Volkswagen Minibus. Enjoying the time, visiting friends, seeing the old haunts, when he first felt the arrival of…something.
Something that did not belong in this world.
Henry Ridge had followed that something: it wasn’t a beacon so much as it was a feeling, one that pulled him along, as if by forces unseen, to a source, one of unending dread. That sense of disturbance, of imbalance; something dark, something birthed from the Lower World and had pushed its way up into ours.
Something.
And as with all things from the Lower World, it had arrived with a terrible, dark hunger, one that Henry Ridge knew would only grow more voracious with the passage of time. His journey had brought him East, here, to the Mid-West, where he now sat parked along a small open area on the muddy banks of the Mississippi River.
Whatever jolt that had sent Henry Ridge on this errand was now diminished, becoming almost too faint to trace, and that had captured his attentions. As best as he could decipher, the signal seemed to split off into two different paths: One to the North, and the other, South.
But how could that be? It had been one singular event?
Forced to choose, Ridge had stopped here, in Paducah Kentucky, at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. He hoped that the inherent power of the merging of the two great rivers would clarify his thoughts and illuminate his path forward.
Henry was rarely (if ever) wrong about these things, but for a moment a splinter of doubt entered his mind, and he wondered if the arrival he sensed from the Lower World was nothing more than an echo in in the hallways of an old man’s mind.