The Devil in Salem Meadows

by Eve Fisher

About the Author: Eve Fisher has had almost 30 stories published with Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, as well as additional publications in other mystery, science-fiction and fantasy magazines.

Excerpt

John Franklin, Ph.D., who hunted vampires and revenants, climbed mountains, and gave lectures on the symbiotic effects of place upon the human psyche as evidenced in behavioral aberrations such as serial killers, met his match in a patch of black ice in northwestern South Dakota. The car was totaled; he nearly was. He spent a painful, drugged time in a hospital whose name he never quite caught, and then was sent for residential rehabilitation and therapy to the Salem Meadows Center, whose location he didn’t know. He hoped that the disorientation he felt—in his body, in space, in time—would come to an end now that the morphine was finally out of his system.

The first night he opened his eyes to a skeletal man with a nightmare face, bent over his bureau.

“Who are you? What do you want?” Franklin cried.

The ruined mouth rumbled, but by the time Franklin could hoist himself up, the man had vanished like another morphine-fueled dream. Except that the top bureau drawer was slightly open, which it hadn’t been before.

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