‘Cold Empty Rooms’, by underground horror sensation Andy Marino, releases on November 10. Read a terrifying excerpt here.
I’m always on the hunt for my latest horror read, and Andy Marino’sCold Empty Rooms (out November 10) looks to be a stunner. I’m always down for horror literature that subverts conventional haunted house tropes, and based on the synopses below, Cold Empty Rooms is jumping to the top of my list. Check out the third chapter of the novel exclusively here, and be sure to add Cold Empty Rooms to your winter TBR!
When Soren Murphy’s aunt passes away, she gifts him her ancient manor. His girlfriend, Mara Davis, is thrilled. They’ve been desperately searching for a home. But something haunts the house. Soren begins to receive messages from an entity known only as the Great Other. Its first direction is simple: Invite others in. The second: Relieve them of their sorrow. Within the shifting walls of this ageless house, wounds have been suffered. And soon, a horrible miracle will unfold.
“[A] masterful work of subtle horror… Marino’s prose is striking and evocative, elevating haunted house tropes and creating an undeniable sense of creeping dread. This is a stunner.” — Publishers Weekly, starred review
William Gregory Payson, if we’re dealin’ henceforth in Christian names.”
This new arrival has settled into the living room’s most magnificent chair, a highbacked rocker carved with the elegance of a rosewood treble clef. Legs out straight, boot heels planted on an upside-down crate stamped LANDEMANN’S DAIRY, camping pack discarded on the hardwood like a canvas body bag scarred with zippers, framed in collapsible metals.
Mara sits on the stone hearth. Fire warms her back, the burning of logs she has witnessed Soren splitting with an axe discovered in the brush, its handle wrapped in vine. His rangy downstrokes require him to stand far back from the stump to complete the arc, Blind Melon bee girl on his shirt rippling as the fabric contorts. Next to her on the hearth, limestone eyes stare up through the copper mask. Hands folded, she watches the men watch each other, missing with a fervent ache the garden. The pockets of her jeans are full of small items from the dirt patch and a quick glance down reveals the outline of the shotgun shell. There is a timeline in which she names herself Huntress and stalks prey through the house’s wooded grounds, vanishing into this willowy and lithe conception of Mara. She indulges this, catches the scent of her future self as she flits past, unrecognizable, hair a rat’s nest of leaves and twigs. A certain holiness surrounds this daydream, and oh, what luxury to let this wild, untamed notion take its course. Meanwhile, how unprepared she is for this new man’s presence, the odd ways his words push the air around in the sparsely furnished living room.
William aims a lopsided grin at Soren, seated on a stool across the crate, and the two men raise silver cans in each other’s direction. Mara’s alter ego shrinks into her mind’s eye and the empty forest shudders in her absence.
“We’re dealing,” Soren says, pausing at a strange interval for a foamy sip, “with whatever kind of name you want to put forth into the atmosphere of our grand and welcoming hall.” He lifts his arms, hunches his shoulders, gestures widely. “Christian, pagan, or otherwise.”
Mara cannot help but look up at the crown molding runneled with grime, exposed Sheetrock bescumbered as if finger-painted with filth by some hunger-striking prisoner. Immobile windows on pulleys adhered with globs of old paint to their tracks. A corduroy armchair the color of a yak shoved into one corner, a now-discarded cushion having left in its wake the odor of a litter box.
Mara’s eyes rove, seeking the orange cat, whom she refers to, at least internally, as Gladys. But Soren’s deceased aunt’s old house is a sprawl of gabled shrugs, its outermost reaches like the crooked spokes on a trampled bike wheel, sheer architectural madness tilting into ramshackle oblivion. Gladys could be anywhere.
The man, at ease, lets the chair rock back and forth. “And what do they call you, brother?”
“Soren Alistair Murphy,” Soren says, draining his beer.
William’s brow furrows and he looks Soren up and down in the exact same manner as he appraised Mara in the yard. His interest now strikes her as something other than sexual. She edges toward giving him the benefit of the doubt.
“You’re paler’n a poltergeist’s titty, son.”
“Irish father,” Soren explains, “Danish mother.”
William removes his hat to reveal dark, sweaty curls. “Got some Viking in you.” He sets the hat on the backpack, finishes his beer, and lets the can fall to the floor. “You know about the blood eagle?”
“Can’t say that I do.”
William lifts a loosely held fist to his mouth and belches softly into it. Then he shoots Mara a fleeting glance. She reads sheepishness in his look.
“You think what the red Indians did to each other was brutal,” William says.
He mimes holding a knife to the place where his damp and matted hair meets his forehead. Mara can so easily visualize the blade from the man’s pack clutched in his hand as he slides the invisible weapon across the dome of his large head like he is scraping a delicate curl of butter from the top of the stick. She wonders if it is really so easy to take a scalp. The fluidity of the motion. She has always imagined hacking and sawing.
William completes the arc at the base of his neck and lowers his arm. “That ain’t nothin’ compared to your ancestors, Mr. Dane.” He shakes his head. “Imagine lying flat, face down in the muddy thoroughfare of your village, some kinda defeated enemy of a Viking raiding party. One minute you’re drawin’ water from the well, the next your whole clan’s put to the sword by some long-haired savages from across the water. And the cold steel goes straight through your back, behind your rib cage, on the right side of your spine”—he mimes stabbing his back through the supports of the rocker—“then on the left”—another thrust—“and though you can’t see shit, you can feel that burning hot pull as your lungs is yanked out through the holes. And them lungs is what makes the wings of the eagle. The blood eagle.”
William unzips a pouch on his pack and comes up with a fresh beer and tosses it across the crate to Soren, who catches it one-handed.
“I’m a quarter Nez Perce myself,” William says with a shrug, “so I’m told. Rest of me’s a mutt.” He nods at the beer. “That’s all I got right there. But I’ll make a run.”
Soren sets his can on the crate. “Probably shouldn’t be drinking the day away.” He gestures vaguely around. “Work on the house never ends.”
William looks around the living room, mouth downturned in a jeweler’s appraisal. “Can’t spy this place from the road, you know. Thought maybe I got hoaxed. Wondered if it wasn’t some kinda lure, your little invitation. But I figured I’d see it through.” He pats his camping pack like it is a sleeping dog. “Ain’t got nothin’ to my name worth stealin’, and if you’d meant to do me harm, well…” He trails off, grinning. Mara notes the blank space of a missing incisor. The pinkish mass of William’s tongue bulges through the gap. “Men have tried, is all I’m inclined to say on that subject.”
Mara thinks again of the knife. Vivid imagery of a blood eagle ritual washes through her mind. She is once again the Huntress, running through a dense pine glade misted by drizzle. There is William Gregory Payson, kneeling over a nude figure splayed face down in the clearing, carving up the victim’s back. He looks at her, smiling that gap-toothed grin as he plunges his fist deep inside the raw wound and fishes around for the lung, and then he is pulling forth a cartilaginous mass the color of his tongue, squeezing it in his fist so that its meatlike lobes tumesce.
“Mara, you okay?”
Soren is facing her, elbows on his knees.
Mara blinks away the vision. “I’m good.”
“You’re so quiet.”
She rises from the hearth. A burning log gives off a sharp snap as if in protest of her abandonment. Without knowing why, she picks up the mask and holds it close to her side. “I’m going to get back to work.”
She lets her gaze fall upon William, expecting this pronouncement to serve as his cue to leave. When he does not move from the rocker and instead only regards her with an inscrutable or distracted look she realizes she has been foolish. The social mores of her old life do not exist in this place. There will be no tacit banishment of an intrusive soul launched upon some pretense or another—work or childcare or illness or chores. William Gregory Payson has been invited here in a manner that implies he need not ever leave. And in eyeing him now, settled in the rocker, Mara knows that this type of man, the type who would answer such an invitation by arriving on foot with his possessions on his back, will not be inclined to turn around. He is not here to reconnoiter the lay of the land. He has seized a remarkable opportunity and short of being gifted a better one will not relinquish it.
She reminds herself that she has consented to this arrangement, at least a fledgling version of it. If Soren has pushed things ahead of her own acclimation to the idea, she still must share the blame.
“It’s nice to meet you,” she tells the new arrival.
William rocks back and forth. “Nice to meet you too, Miss Mara. Let me know if you need another pair of hands for pullin’ weeds. I ain’t no gardener but you drop me in the middle of some task I’m liable to see it through better’n most.”
“Thank you.” She heads out of the living room. Uncertain light sends shadows pooling down a hall as if tossed from some great height and left to splatter. Gladys moves across a doorway from one unseen place to another. Is it an omen that the cat did not make herself known to William?
“Hey.” Footsteps at her back. Soren’s voice is a low hiss. “Mara.”
She turns at the pressure of his hand upon her shoulder. There is a stye forming on the rim of his eyelid, a red ball bearing–sized lump. His face is drawn, shrouded in the corridor’s shadows. There is a gauntness to his concern. “Seriously,” he says. “Is everything okay? I’m getting a weird vibe from you.”
Mara gets the unwelcome sensation that whispers travel in this house, borne on avenues of decrepit molding. She imagines William closing his eyes, rocking in their one good chair, and listening to every word.
“I’m seriously fine,” she says.
“You know in movies when a sniper is lying there in his hiding place and his spotter is looking through the scope, and he’s like, adjusting for wind speed or whatever, click click, just a millimeter to the left—that’s like me and you. I can sense the energy coming off you, like nobody I’ve ever met. Since the moment I sat down next to you at the Lucky Sevens. Click click, you know what I’m saying? Something’s off, Mar-Mar.” He takes both her hands in his. “Talk to me, baby. This isn’t going to work if we aren’t pursuing radical honesty.”
The stye seems to expand and contract, some bulbous throb rippling across the upper edges of his eyelid. His wet gaze implores her. Shadows move like inkblots in the whites. Pursuing radical honesty? When did they settle on this policy?
“Freedom,” she blurts out to connect him to the one-word mantra they flung into the van’s stale air as they crossed the Midwestern states. Gladys retraces her silent padded steps as if she is a sentry on patrol.
He squeezes her hands, thumbs pressing into her palms. “Freedom,” he parrots back. Then he lowers his voice to an all but inaudible whisper. “Is it William?”
“Not him personally.” So much for radical honesty. “I think maybe it was just too soon for me. I was sort of looking forward to carving out my own space here, before we opened our doors to anyone and everyone.”
“So you are mad at me about the flyers.”
“No, Soren, I’m genuinely not mad at you. I’m grateful that we wound up here, together—grateful for you, for taking me here—and I agree that we should use all this empty space for a good purpose. It’s just a lot, for me, right now.”
“Okay,” Soren says, eyes shining. “I totally get it.” Outside the hallway’s grimy window, the swiftly moving clouds obscure the sun. Soren hesitates. “He doesn’t, like, remind you of your husband, or anything…”
“He’s nothing like Glen,” she assures him. The name exits her mouth, slides down her neck, and wraps itself around her throat. Soren picks up on her muted distress and moves his hands to her shoulders. He is tall and pours quiet strength into her, and she wishes to feel herself falling forward into his arms. Her attraction to Soren is unquenchable and hopeless, and she runs a hand up underneath his shirt to rest against the warmth of his taut abdomen. “And neither are you,” she whispers.
She tilts her head upward. His lips find hers, and she tastes cheap beer. Her tongue moves past his front teeth.
A sharp knock on the doorjamb resounds from the other end of the hall. Mara and Soren part abruptly and turn to find William standing there, enveloped in crawling, percolating shadow.
“There a little fisherman’s room I can use?”
Soren points. “Hallway at the other end of the living room, past the fireplace. Second door on the left.”
“It’s just number one,” he assures them, patting his stomach. “I’m full of beer.”
“The plumbing works just fine,” Soren says. “So, do whatever.”
William touches the brim of his hat and heads back through the living room. As his thumping boots fade, Soren laughs softly. “All righty, then.”
“He’s got a knife in his backpack,” Mara says. “I saw it when he first got here.”
Soren considers this. “Like, a Swiss Army knife?”
Mara demonstrates the blade’s relative size with her hands. “Like, a knife knife.”
“Well, it seems like he lives out of that backpack. I’d carry a knife too if I was a hundred percent nomadic.”
“I’m not saying a knife on its own is weird.” She pauses. “I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m going back outside.”
Soren interlaces her fingers with his own and pulls her toward him like a dancer reeling in his partner. They move together in a sudden crush that makes her feel out of control, light on her feet, dangerously unbalanced. His lips are on hers again, fingers gliding up under the untucked button-down she has borrowed from his overflowing suitcase. She is holding her breath, closing her eyes. A toilet’s muffled flush sends the sound of a distant waterfall cascading through hidden plumbing. Mara calls upon the body of the Huntress and moves against Soren in some new audacious way, crisp and brittle leaves crumbling in her hair, flying through her wild, tangled world with his legs pressed into her thigh spurring her on into the deepening afternoon as heavy boots come forth, louder and louder, spoiling the hunt.
