My Inner Darkness: The In Between
Every summer, Providence sets its river on fire. Louie Russo is the only one watching the dark between the flames.
For ten years he listened to the bottom of the ocean for the Navy, picking real submarines out of the noise and filtering out the ghosts. He was the best there was. Then he stopped sleeping, and the ghosts followed him home.
Now he volunteers on the river, feeding the fires that float through downtown while the city looks on. Below the last bridge, between two of those fires, there's a stretch of black water that pulls at him every time the boat goes by. Something there is paying attention.
At the edge of sleep he has started to see them: walkers with legs and no bodies, a shape in the corner of his bedroom, something behind him that copies him when he moves. He logs each one like a sonar contact, with a time and a bearing, because there's an ordinary explanation for all of it. There always is.
Two women are watching him too. Yesenia, the night nurse one floor down, leaves food on his mat, hears him pacing at four in the morning, and doesn't ask. Bridie, who keeps a shop of old Irish books in Salem, is the first person who has ever believed him. She won't take a cent for her help. Someday, she says, she'll ask him for something small.
And far out past the edge of the continental shelf, a sound he once filtered out of the Navy's data has come back. It's holding a constant bearing. The range is closing.
The In Between is a slow-burn psychological horror novel with a love story on the same collision course, set in the river city where H. P. Lovecraft is buried and in the town that once hanged its neighbors for what its children said they saw. It's about what the mind throws away to keep us sane, and what happens to a man who stops throwing it away.
Book Two of My Inner Darkness. It stands on its own.
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