The Devil’s Rock Cut
—an excerpt—
“The Devil’s in you, boy!”
Nathan hears her screaming through a dark funnel in time, a shrill voice stretched thin over the highway traffic. He remembers Aunt Kathy standing on her front lawn, silhouetted by the porch light, her dress blowing in the wind. That was when he left his bike in her yard and ran, worried he would get home and make Mom and Dad think he needed the hospital.
Not an ordinary hospital. Mom and Dad are okay with that, but not Aunt Kathy. She will never shake the idea of a Bondarchuk Curse, some plague of madness, a Long Darkness of the Mind going back centuries to the Devil trapping her ancestors in the Old Country.
She’ll never forgive her brother for inheriting that Curse, then having a son who caught it.
Devil/1
A car-horn startles him back to the present; high-beams expose him. He goes right, away from the traffic, into the ditch.
Nathan can’t remember why he ran away that night. He is sure it happened five years ago. But that also feels wrong. It’s like time is out of whack, stretching and twisting in this highway funnel. He can’t nail it down.
