A Step
Past Darkness : A Novel
Vera
Kurian
On Sale Date: February 20, 2024
9780778310761
Hardcover
$30.00 USD
Fiction / Thrillers / Psychological
448 pages
I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER meets Stephen
King in this character-driven thriller about a study group of six teenagers who
witness something tragic in an abandoned mine, which comes back to haunt them
20 years later.
SIX CLASSMATES.
ONE TERRIFYING NIGHT.
A MURDER TWENTY YEARS IN THE MAKING…
There’s more to Wesley Falls than meets the
eye, but for six high school students, it’s home.
Kelly, the new girl and rule-follower.
Maddy, the beauty and the church favorite.
Padma, the brains and all-A student.
Casey, the jock and football star.
James, the burnout and just trying to make it
to graduation.
And Jia, the psychic, who can see the future.
When these six are assigned to work on a
summer group project, their lives are forever changed. At an end of the year
party in the abandoned mine, they witness a preventable tragedy, but no one
will take them seriously. As things escalate, they realize the church, the
police, and the town’s founders are all conspiring to cover up what happened.
When James is targeted as the scapegoat, to avoid suspicion, they vow their
silence and to never contact each other again. Their plan works – almost.
Twenty years later, Maddy is found murdered is
Wesley Falls, and the remaining five are forced to confront their past and work
together to finally put right what happened all those years ago. If they can
survive…
BUY
LINKS:
Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-step-past-darkness-original-vera-kurian/20155061?ean=9780778310761
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Step-Past-Darkness-Novel/dp/0778310760
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1
August 17, 2015
The mountain had existed long before there had been anyone
around to name it, pushed up by the inevitable forces that made the Appalachian
Range millions of years ago. Hulking, it stood with a peculiar formation at its
apex, two peaks like a pair of horns, giving the mountain its eventual name of
Devil’s Peak. The coal mine inside was abandoned long ago.
On the southern side of Devil’s Peak was the town of Wesley
Falls, where there were no remnants of the mine except for the overgrown paths
crisscrossing up to two entrances, ineffectually boarded up, partially hidden
but available to anyone looking hard enough. Down the western side were the
steeper paths, far more overgrown with vegetation, leading down to the
abandoned town of Evansville. That side of the mountain and beyond grew strange
because of the coal fire that had been burning underground for almost a
century. The Bureau of Mines had managed to contain the fire to the western
side of the mountain so that only Evansville suffered. Only Evansville had
bouts of noxious gases, open cracks of brimstone in the roads, residents
complaining of hot basements and well water. Over time they left town, leaving
behind a ghost.
Unlike its unfortunate neighbor, Wesley Falls had avoided
the mine fire and transitioned from a coal-mining town to something not unlike
Pennsylvania suburbia. It was the sort of town where one of the billboards
outside the Golden Praise megachurch proclaimed, “Wesley Falls: the BEST place
to raise a family!” and most adults agreed with that assessment. The sort of
place where the city council had voted against a bid to allow a McDonalds to
open, arguing that it would “lead to the deterioration of the character of
Wesley Falls.” This had less to do with concerns about childhood obesity or
dense traffic than it did a desire to keep the town trapped in amber. The sort
of town where the sheriff was the son of the previous sheriff.
Jia Kwon, stepping off a train at the station some miles
away from Wesley Falls, looked around the crowded station for that son—the
sheriff—now in his thirties, though she had trouble picturing this. Sheriff
Zachary Springsteen had an air of formality that she couldn’t match up with
the image of the boy she knew from high school, whom everyone called Blub. He
was an inoffensive, nondescript kid who delivered papers via his clackety bike,
who then grew to be the generic teen who stood in the back row of yearbook
pictures. She had always been friendly with him, but never quite friends,
starting from when she had transferred from St. Francis to the Wesley Falls
public school system and Blub sat next to her in homeroom.
Was the fact that she had chosen to keep in contact with
this not-quite-friend after she moved away from Wesley Falls an accident?
No—she knew that now. Blub had been the perfect person to report back town news
over the years because he never suspected her interest was anything more than
curiosity. Their exchanges over the years had been just enough for him to feel
comfortable, or compelled enough, to make the phone call that had brought her
here.
Jia paused to put her phone in her purse, pretending she did
not notice any stares. No one looked twice at her in Philly, but here she stood
out as the only Asian, drawing even more attention to herself because she had
dyed her hair a shade of silvery gray with hints of lavender in it. It would
only be worse when she got into town, but even as a kid she had been so used to
being stared at that she just exaggerated her strangeness, opting for bright
clothes rather than trying to blend in.
“Jia?” said an uncertain voice.
She turned her head and instantly recognized Blub, who stood
with the gawky awkwardness of someone uncomfortable with his own height.
“Blub!” she exclaimed, coming closer. She embraced him, her head only coming up
to his midchest. “You’ve grown two feet!”
He shoved his hands into his pockets, smiling. “Want to ask
me if I play basketball?” Their smiles felt hollow, she realized, because of
the strangeness of the situation and everything they weren’t saying. “I
appreciate you taking the time to come out here. I know you’re probably busy
but…” He led her to his patrol car. “Sorry, you’ll have to ride in the back.”
“It’s no problem,” she murmured, surprised to see that he
had brought someone along for the ride.
“This is Deputy Sheriff Henry,” Blub said, turning the car
on. A smaller man whom she did not recognize half turned and nodded at her
curtly, though Jia could see him looking at her in the rearview mirror as they
pulled away from the station. What on earth had Blub told him?
That once, in one of their email exchanges, when he
complained about having to repair his roof, she made a joke about which team to
bet on for the Super Bowl, and he did, and she had been right? That she had one
too many stock tips that turned out to be good? That she inexplicably sent him
a “You okay?” email at 8:16 a.m. on September eleventh, thirty minutes before
American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade
Center? There had been enough incidents as strange as these that when he called
her last year asking for help, it felt like something clicking into place.
Something that was supposed to happen. Over the years, she had started to feel
comfortable with that clicking feeling, rather than being afraid of it. Last
winter he had called her saying that Jane Merrick was missing from the
old-folks home—she was prone to running— and she was outside in the freezing
weather in only a nightgown, and they were worried about her. He did not say
why he was asking her, a person who hadn’t lived in Wesley Falls for two
decades, a person who neither knew nor liked Jane Merrick. She told him to look
in the barn on the Dandriges’ property without providing an explanation of how
she knew. She knew because she saw it. She knew because sometimes she could
call up things when she wanted to, though not all the time, but this was still
significantly better than when she was a kid and she couldn’t control when the
visions hit her, or stop them, or even understand them.
And now, in the peak of summer heat, he had called again,
saying that there was a missing person, could she help, friends were worried.
She did not ask who because she felt something like the deepest note on a
double bass vibrating, reverberating through her body. She saw herself walking,
her white maxi dress—the one she was wearing right now—catching on brambles as
she maneuvered her way down the overgrown path to the ghost town.
She had to go back to Wesley Falls. It was time.
“You all went to school together?” Deputy Sheriff Henry said
when they pulled onto the highway.
“Yeah,” she said. “We didn’t overlap with you, did we?”
Henry shook his head. “Blub and I go way back,” she said, meeting Blub’s eyes
in the rearview mirror.
“I’ll never get over the fact that people call you Blub,”
Henry remarked. “How’d you get that name anyway? Were you chubby or something?”
“I don’t think there’s an origin story,” Blub said, looking
like he wanted the subject to change.
“I remember!” Jia exclaimed. “It’s when you threw up in
fourth grade.” She leaned forward, pressing against the grate that divided the
car, addressing Henry directly. “It was during homeroom. He threw up on his
pile of books. I remember because it was clear and ran down the sides like
pancake syrup.”
Henry laughed and Blub flushed. “Jia, you can’t remember
that because you weren’t there. You were at St. Francis in grade school!”
She stopped laughing abruptly. “I could have sworn I
remember that happening!”
“Sometimes when enough people tell you a story, you start to
remember it like you were there,” Henry mused.
Sometimes, Jia thought. But there were other people
who could see things that had happened or would happen, even if they weren’t
there.
As they drove down the highway and drew closer to Wesley
Falls, the mood shifted to an anxious silence. Jia checked her phone for
anything work related. She ran a small solar panel company called Green
Solutions with her two best friends, both hyper-competent, both probably
picking up on Jia’s strange tone when she said she had to go back home for a
short trip. They probably thought that it had to do with the settling of her
mother’s estate, and Jia, even though she was uncomfortable with lying, allowed
them to believe this. When her mother had died, Jia had come to Wesley Falls to
liquidate everything in The Gem Shop and sell the store itself to the least
annoying bidder: a fifty-something-year-old former teacher who wanted to open a
bakery. A significant part of the decision had been not that her baked items
were good—they were—but something about her aggressive combinations of spices
had seemed witchy, and, most importantly, she did not attend Golden Praise.
Jia’s mother, Su-Jin, would have approved.
And now, with Blub turning off the highway, her heart felt
torn in different directions. Wesley Falls wasn’t home, but it was, because it
was where most of her memories of Su-Jin lived. As the car moved it felt as if
they traveled through an invisible veil, something that felt uncomfortable in a
way she could not put into words anyone else would understand, but was familiar
and, she knew, strange. Strange like how she was strange.
But then it came: the feeling that arose every time she had
gone home to visit her mother—the feeling that she shouldn’t be here. Except
this time, it was worse. They had just arrived in Wesley Falls, passing Wiley’s
Bar, which was on the outskirts of town. It was frequented by truckers stopping
for a cheap burger and beer.
“That place is still here?” she murmured.
“They got karaoke now,” Blub offered.
“Please kill me,” Jia responded, trying to sound light. Blub
laughed, then turned onto Throckmartin Lane. The street hadn’t changed in
twenty years: it still housed Greenbriar Park, which everyone called “The Good
Park,” and the larger homes where the wealthier families lived. Built before
McMansions had hit this part of Pennsylvania, the houses differed in their
architecture—some colonial, some farmhouse—but were all similar with their
immaculate lawns, American flags, and WESLEY FALLS FOOTBALL signs.
Blub slowed to a stop, making eye contact with her in the
rearview mirror. He was waiting for directions.
She gestured for him to turn onto Main Street, that old,
curved road with the bottom half of the C drawn out like a jaw that had dropped
wide open—it was impossible to drive anywhere in Wesley Falls without driving
on Main Street at some point. They passed the police station, then the row of
shops. Some of the mom-and-pop stores that lined Main Street had changed, but
Wesley Falls still didn’t have a Target, a chain grocery store, or a reasonable
place to buy clothes. Indeed, the best place to raise a family was apparently a
place where you had to drive ten miles to the mall to get many of the things
people wanted. She gazed at the bakery that used to be The Gem Shop. Spade’s
Hardware was still there—her mother had had a grudging friendship with the
owners. The candy shop had changed ownership but it was still a candy shop.
They drove along the north side of town, by the lake and the Neskaseet
River—called Chicken River by locals because of its proximity to and usage by
the chicken processing plant at the north edge of town.
Wesley Falls and Evansville had both popped up in the 1800s,
their economies at first built entirely around the Wesley coal mine, which
resided inside Devil’s Peak. No matter how many times well-meaning adults
attempted to close off the entrance of the mine, which had been abandoned in
the 1930s when the coal ran out, high school kids always found their way in.
Drawn to the allure of ghost stories, rumors that if you found the right path
you could find the mine fire in Evansville, and the inevitable urban legends
about the Heart.
Jia pointed and Blub turned onto the unpaved road that
crossed the Neskaseet and wound up the side of Devil’s Peak to Evansville. From
this elevation, she could see the entire tiny, abandoned town. The simple,
squared-off eight shape of the town’s few roads, the dilapidated strip of
larger buildings at the center, then the rectangles of homes, all identical
because they had been provided by the mining company.
The road came to an end, trees and shrubbery blocking their
passage. Blub put the car in Park, turning to face Jia. “Can’t drive farther.”
“Then we walk,” she said. She led the way, ignoring the
looks from both men as she freed herself from prickly branches that caught onto
her dress. Blub used his nightstick to whack away a tangle of vegetation, then
Jia found a path that led down to the town.
It smelled like sulfur with a hint of cigar. Jia picked her
way gingerly down the main road, which was buckled and cracked in places, then
turned a corner behind the old church and stopped. There was someone in the
road wearing a bright fuchsia shirt. She could only see the top half of the
figure’s body. The lower part, from the stomach down, was trapped inside the
road in what looked like a fresh sinkhole.
Jia knew without looking. Some part of her had known from
the moment Blub called her. He needed help finding a missing person, but he
hadn’t said who. This was the thing that had pulled her back, made her feel an
insistent anxiety for the past few months.
Blub and Henry were running to the body, the latter yelling.
When Jia finally approached, Blub was trying to get a pulse. She watched the
two men huddle over the body, Henry almost making an attempt to pull her from
the chasm before Blub stopped him. This could be a crime scene.
Blub sat back on his haunches. The fuchsia T-shirt was
soaked with last night’s rain. Her blond hair was pulled into a ponytail,
tendrils stuck to the sides of her face. That face. Familiar but different. She’s
still so pretty, Jia thought. Her mouth was open and a scratch stood out
livid on her pale cheek. Her eyes were closed.
“It’s her,” Blub stated.
“Maddy Wesley,” Henry said, disturbed and awed.
“You knew that Maddy was the missing person? You didn’t tell
me,” Jia said, trying to keep her voice stable.
Blub remained crouched, his elbows on his knees with his
hands dangling down. “Didn’t think I needed to,” he stated, his voice devoid of
the warmth it had had while in the car. He didn’t look at her as he examined
the scene, and it occurred to Jia that he was actually the sheriff. Not Blub,
the kid who threw up on his pile of books, but an actual agent of the law.
Jia edged backward, fearful that the road could break under
her.
“You know her?” Henry asked.
His gaze made her self-conscious. Jia had never been a good
liar. Much of the lying she had done that summer so many years ago had been by
omission. She was working on a project. She was hanging out with Padma. These
things had been true, but misleading.
“She was in our year,” Jia managed. “We all went to high
school together.”
Blub’s eyes went from the body to Jia. “You weren’t friends,
though, were you?” Maddy ran with the popular crowd, the Golden Praise crowd.
Jia had been the opposite of that.
“No,” she said finally. “We weren’t friends.”
SOCIAL
LINKS:
Author website: https://www.verakurian.com/
IG: https://www.instagram.com/verakurianauthor/?hl=en
Twitter: https://twitter.com/vera_kurian
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