The Book of Accidents, page 1
The Book of Accidents is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2021 by Terribleminds LLC
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Circle colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Hardback ISBN 9780399182136
Ebook ISBN 9780399182143
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Fritz Metsch, adapted for ebook
Cover design and illustration: Michael Boland
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Prologue 1: Ride the Lightning
Prologue 2: The Boy Is Found
Part One: A One-Dollar Deal with the Dying
Chapter 1: Tinnitus
Chapter 2: The Lawyer
Chapter 3: The Box Has Eyes
Chapter 4: The Conversation
Chapter 5: The One Condition
Interlude: The Arrival
Part Two: Moving In
Chapter 6: I See a Red Door
Chapter 7: Quality of Soul
Chapter 8: A Game of Fish
Chapter 9: The Rattle of Dice
Chapter 10: Chainsaw Owls
Chapter 11: Circles, Stovepipes, and the Strange Smell of Funnel Cake
Chapter 12: Fugue State
Chapter 13: Turtles All the Way Down
Chapter 14: That Nagging Feeling
Chapter 15: The Writer
Chapter 16: The Fragile
Chapter 17: Rescuing Oneself
Chapter 18: Jake
Chapter 19: Seizure
Chapter 20: The Killer Is Revealed
Chapter 21: The Man Who Fell Between the Cracks
Chapter 22: Brood Parasites and Egyptian Rivers
Chapter 23: Dinner with Jake
Chapter 24: The Boy Who Talks to Books
Chapter 25: We All Float Down Here
Chapter 26: Staring at It Isn’t Gonna Fix It
Chapter 27: A Day Without Maddie
Chapter 28: Into the Woods
Chapter 29: Aaaaaand We’re Back
Interlude: The Coal Mine at Ramble Rocks
Part Three: Too Little Skin for Too Much Skull
Chapter 30: This Is Halloween
Chapter 31: Of Masks and Magic
Chapter 32: Precipitation
Chapter 33: The Spiral
Chapter 34: The Line Between
Chapter 35: Glitches Get Stitches
Chapter 36: Sharing Is Caring
Interlude: Where Maddie Went
Part Four: The Many Kinds of Magic
Chapter 37: And Then They Talked
Chapter 38: Post-Coital Reality Check
Chapter 39: Broken Stars
Chapter 40: The Wizard’s Castle
Chapter 41: The Book of Accidents
Chapter 42: A Mirror, Slowly Cracking
Chapter 43: Expert in the Ways of Weird, Weird Shit
Chapter 44: Nate and Maddie
Chapter 45: Ramble Rocks
Chapter 46: The Table Rock
Chapter 47: True Dark
Interlude: The Boy Who Lived
Part Five: The 99th
Chapter 48: Broken Fingernails
Chapter 49: The Oliver Process
Chapter 50: Lamp in the Dark
Chapter 51: When the Maker Meets the Made
Chapter 52: House of Entropy
Chapter 53: The Gravity of Guilt and Vengeance
Chapter 54: Stars to Stones
Chapter 55: Eject or Die
Chapter 56: Eschaton
Chapter 57: The Hunt
Chapter 58: The Lodge
Chapter 59: Another Way
Chapter 60: The Splinter
Chapter 61: The Things We Carry
Chapter 62: The Fox and the Fucking Grapes
Chapter 63: The Nature of Human Sacrifice
Interlude: Jake and the Demon
Part Six: Makers, Breakers, and Travelers
Chapter 64: Orpheus Looked Back
Chapter 65: Thanks for Ramblin’ By!
Chapter 66: One More Shot at the Goal
Chapter 67: Tell Me, Doctor, Where Are We Goin’ This Time
Chapter 68: Hiding by Hanging Over the Edge
Chapter 69: Up and at ’Em, Tiger
Chapter 70: Carving Birds
Chapter 71: Travelers
Chapter 72: The Winnowing
Chapter 73: Better Remember, Lightning Never Strikes Twice
Chapter 74: Enjoy Your Wintry Tomb
Chapter 75: So Take Me Away, I Don’t Mind
Chapter 76: A Face in the Glass, a Message in the Snow
Part Seven: Sacrifices
Chapter 77: The Promise
Chapter 78: The Altar Stone
Chapter 79: The Fatal Bellman, Which Gives the Sternest Good Night
Chapter 80: The Sin Eater
Epilogue: The Numbers Man
Dedication
Afterword and Acknowledgments
By Chuck Wendig
About the Author
A father, Steven said, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary evil.
—James Joyce, Ulysses
May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house.
—George Carlin
PROLOGUE 1
Ride the Lightning
Edmund Walker Reese was a man of numbers. Not an accountant, or a mathematician, but, rather, a man of simple interests, and it was here and now, in the Blackledge SCI—State Correctional Institution—that he sat strapped to an electric chair, running the numbers.
Three guards walked him here.
They passed seven other prisoners on Death Row, each in his own cell.
There would be one executioner, too: an anonymous man who would throw the switch, the man who would end Edmund Reese.
It was ten p.m. on a Tuesday. Second Tuesday in March, 1990.
(Time, after all, was a number, too.)
But there were details he did not yet know, and so he asked the older guard who was slitting Edmund’s prison jumper up the calf to make room for the electrodes. (The leg had already been shaved that morning, right before Edmund Walker Reese—Eddie to his friends, of which he had none—ate his last meal, a simple bowl of wholesome chicken noodle soup.)
The older guard, a man named Carl Graves, had sideburns so gray and wispy they were like bits of fog clinging to his jowls. (Though the top of his hair was dark, not yet taken by age and drained of color.) He was in his forties, maybe early fifties, it was hard to tell. A whiff of sourness on his breath: cheap whiskey, Walker thought. Carl was never drunk, not really, but he was always drinking. (Smoking, too, though here the whiskey seemed to mask the smell.) The drinking was why Graves always seemed to hover somewhere between weary and angry. But the whiskey made him honest, too, and that’s why Edmund liked him. As much as he could like anybody, anyway.
Reese chided the guard slicing the leg of his jumpsuit: “Be careful of my left leg. There’s an injury there.”
“That where the girl gotcha?” Graves asked.
But Reese didn’t answer. Instead, he said: “Tell me more. More numbers. How many volts in the chair?”
The guard sniffed and stood up, saying, “Two thousand.”
“Do you know the dimensions of the chair? Weight. Width. And so on?”
“Don’t know, don’t care.”
“Is there an audience? How many?”
Graves looked to the window that Edmund faced—a window that had metal blinds pulled down over it. “Got a big audience today, Eddie.” Graves used his nickname even though they were not friends, not at all, but Edmund did not object. “Seems people really want to watch you cook.” Cruelty flashed in Carl Graves’s eyes like a lit match. Edmund recognized that cruelty, and liked it.
“Yes, yes,” Edmund said, unable to conceal his irritation. His skin itched. His jaw tightened. “But how many. The number, please.”
“Behind the window, twelve. Six private citizens invited at the behest of the warden and the governor, and six journalists.”
“Is that all?”
“There are more watching
Reese did the calculation. “Forty-two. A good number.”
“Is it? If you say so.” Graves stepped aside as the other guard, a big slab of meat with a lawnmower buzz cut, stood with a grunt and began affixing the electrodes to Edmund’s shorn scalp. Carl sniffed. “You know, you’re special.”
I am special, Edmund thought. He knew it to be true, or did once. Now, he wasn’t so sure. He’d once had a mission. Been given life and light and a quest. A sacred quest, he was told. Blessed, consecrated, holy and unholy in equal measure, and yet, if that were true, why was he here? Caught like a fly in a slowly closing hand. Foiled at Number Five. Only Number Five! He had work yet to do.
“Special how?” he asked, because he wanted to hear it.
“This chair, Old Smokey—most electric chairs have names, a lot of them are called Old Sparky, but here in PA, it’s Old Smokey—well, it’s been in storage since 1962. Last fucker who fried in this thing was Elmo Smith, rapist and murderer. And then they stopped using it. Been nine death warrants since Elmo, but all of them got by on appeal. But then, you came along, Eddie. Lucky number ten.”
Numbers flashed through Edmund Reese’s mind, doing a do-si-do square dance—again, nothing mathematical. But he was looking for something. Patterns. Truth. A sacred message.
“Number ten isn’t classically lucky,” Edmund said, twisting his lips into a grimace. “What number am I?”
“Number ten. I told you.”
“No, I mean, how many before me? Died? In this chair?”
Graves looked to the big ginger guard for an answer. Big Ginger provided, saying, “Before him, three hundred and fifty fried in the hot seat.”
“Makes you three-fifty-one,” Graves said.
Edmund considered that number: 351.
What did it mean? It had to mean something. Because for it to mean nothing, for all of it to have added up to the sum total of a bucket of piss and shit, would kill him. It would kill him in a way this chair would not. Kill him in a way worse than those girls—
No, he chastised himself. They were not girls. They were just things. Each a number. Each a purpose. Each a sacrifice. Number One with the pigtails, Number Two with the painted nails, Number Three with the birthmark just under the left eye, Number Four with that scrape on her elbow, and Number Five—
Rage throttled him and Edmund tensed up in the chair as if he were already being electrocuted.
“Settle down, Eddie,” Graves said. Then the older guard leaned in and again, there glimmered that flash of nastiness in his eyes. “You’re thinking about her, aren’t you? The one that got away.”
For a moment, Edmund felt truly seen. Maybe Graves did earn the right to use his nickname. “How did you know?”
“Oh. I can tell. I’ve been a guard here on Death Row for a while, and in Gen Pop for a long time before that. Started when I was eighteen. At first you hold it all back. Keep it at bay. But it’s like water in the tides, washing up on your beach, pulling a little bit of your sand away, day after day. Soon you’re pickling in it. Brining like pig meat. It gets in you. So you get to recognizing it. Evil, I mean. You know how it thinks. How it is. What it wants.” Graves licked his lips. “You know, your hunting ground? Where you took those girls—”
Those things.
“It was near my house. Scared my wife. Scared my kid.”
“It wasn’t them I was after.”
“No, I guess not. Just the girls. Young girls. Four dead. And as for the fifth, well, she got lucky, didn’t she?”
“Number Five got away,” Edmund said in sorrow.
“And when she got away, you got caught.”
“I wasn’t supposed to get caught.”
A mean grin crossed Graves’s face. “And yet, here you are.” With that, the guard slapped him on the knee. “One thing you ought to know, Eddie, is that what goes around, comes around. You get what you give.”
“You also give what you get.”
“If you say so.”
They cinched all the belts, checked the electrodes one more time, and informed him of what was to happen. They asked him one last time if he cared to have a chaplain present, but he’d already refused that opportunity and did not beg for it now, for as he told them, I have a patron in this life, and the demon is not here. They explained, almost jokingly, that on the other side of the door was the prison superintendent, on an open line with the governor’s office just in case of any (and here Graves snort-laughed) “last-minute reprieves.” They explained that his remains would go into a potter’s field, for Edmund Reese had no family left in this world.
And with that, they opened the metal shades.
Edmund saw the witnesses and the audience that had gathered to watch him die. They sat, equal parts horrified and eager, held rapt by those polar forces like ball bearings between two strong magnets. The executioner turned on the voltage, then the amperage, and then went to the power panel to flip the switch—which was not a comical Frankenstein-making switch on the wall you could pull down dramatically, but, rather, a simple white switch, so small you could flick it with a thumb.
And then the thumb moved and—
Edmund Reese felt the world light up around him, big and bright. All things washed out in the wave of white. It felt suddenly like he was falling—and then, the opposite, like he was being picked up by invisible hands, the way a cow must’ve felt when sucked up into a tornado, and next thing he knew, he was gone from the chair, gone from that world, not dead, no—
He was something, and somewhere, else.
PROLOGUE 2
The Boy Is Found
The hunter, Mike O’Hara, was not a fancy man, but he dreamt of pheasant under glass. It was a family recipe, passed down from his grandmother to his father and now to him and his brothers, Petey and Paul. But they didn’t give a shit about pheasant under glass, or hunting like Dad did, so Mike hunted alone. Again. Today of all days: his father’s birthday. Or would’ve been. Rest in peace, old man.
Mike was not a great hunter, and pheasant was a hard bird to find here, nowadays. So he wandered farther and farther afield in search of a nice cockbird to startle out of the fields and fencerows. Worse, he didn’t have a hunting dog with him, either. The work was his own, so he did it slow and methodically, as his father had taught him.
But as he did, his mind wandered. He thought about his dad, dead from a stroke—a blood clot shot like a bullet into his brain. He thought about Petey’s debts and Paul’s liver issues from drinking. He remembered being a kid and swimming in a quarry not far from here. And as his mind wandered, so did his feet, not paying much attention to where he was at or where he was headed—until he came upon a row of dying ash trees, poor things eaten up and half-killed by ash borer beetles, leaving once-lush branches looking like bones stripped clean. Beyond, he spied the crumbling white frontispiece of the Ramble Rocks mine. Overgrown with grape vines and poison ivy, nature coming to reclaim the space.
