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  Praise for A Black and Endless Sky

  “Atmospheric and terrifying … readers won’t be able to put [A Black and Endless Sky] down.” —Library Journal

  “In A Black and Endless Sky, Matthew Lyons has written a lush, unsettling, visceral story that is Lovecraftian and uncanny, yet touching and endearing. This is a powerful, immersive experience.” —Richard Thomas, Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson Award nominee

  “A gripping read filled with tension and terror, the pacing is metered with otherworldly horrors and atmospheric haunts well acquainted with the unique isolation of the desert. A creepy and unsettling tale that gets under your skin and stays there.” —Kathleen Kaufman, author of the Diabhal trilogy, Hag, and The Lairdbalor

  “Horror is at its best when hearts are broken alongside the things going bump in the night, and Matthew Lyons’ A Black and Endless Sky delivers—prepare to be thrilled, touched, and scared shitless in this sprawling tale you’ll wish was as endless as the ominous sky in the title.” —Fred Venturini, author of The Heart Does Not Grow Back and To Dust You Shall Return

  “A Black and Endless Sky builds tension from the first page, delivers a powerful left hook, then pulls readers into the tumultuous lives of Nell and Jonah. From there it’s a well-blended mix of action, noir, horror, and compelling humanity. Matthew Lyons is swiftly establishing himself as a master of gritty, dark noir, with his own brand of clear-eyed, effective character study. A talented author.”—Laurel Hightower, author of Crossroads and Whispers in the Dark

  “Siblings Jonah and Nell take a terrifying journey that tests the bounds of family, loyalty, and reality. Thought provoking and scary. Read with the lights on!” —Robert Rotstein, USA Today and New York Times bestselling author

  “An intense, gripping, innovative novel filled with a delicious panoply of horrors. Get ready for a wild, creepy, and high-octane ride.” —Daco Auffenorde, award-winning author of Cover Your Tracks

  A

  BLACK

  AND

  ENDLESS

  SKY

  By Matthew Lyons

  Keylight Books

  an imprint of Turner Publishing Company

  Nashville, Tennessee

  www.turnerpublishing.com

  A Black and Endless Sky

  Copyright © 2022 by Matthew Lyons. All rights reserved.

  This book or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Cover design by M.S. Corley

  Book design by Misha Beletsky

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Lyons, Matthew (Short story writer), author.

  Title: A black and endless sky / by Matthew Lyons.

  Description: Nashville, Tennessee : Turner Publishing Company, [2022] |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021025605 (print) | LCCN 2021025606 (ebook) | ISBN 9781684427093 (paperback) | ISBN 9781684427109 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781684427116 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Brothers and sisters—Fiction. | Automobile travel--Southwest, New—Fiction. | GSAFD: Occult fiction. | LCGFT: Paranormal fiction. | Novels.

  Classification: LCC PS3612.Y576 B57 2022 (print) | LCC PS3612.Y576 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021025605

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021025606

  Printed in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  For Alice LeOra Merritt

  One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted—

  One need not be a House—

  The Brain has Corridors—surpassing

  Material Place

  Emily Dickinson

  So, brother, raise another pint

  Rev up the engine and drive off in the night

  See you somewhere, some place, some time

  I know there’s better brothers, but you’re the only one that’s mine.

  Murder by Death

  Prologue

  THE MURMUR

  From this far up, the desert looks like an ocean churning in the dark, the glowing worksite a galleon on black waves. Down in the sandy scrub below, the workers use spotlights to stab holes in heaven, hunting the skies for helicopters, planes, drones, ultralights, anything, everything. They do not abide trespassers here. Not tonight. Not when they’re so close. In between the lights and machines, jumpsuits and helmets scurry from trailer to trailer like nervous army ants, clutching clipboards and radios, trying to make sure everything hangs together the way it’s supposed to. Tonight, something’s different. Tonight, something’s happening.

  Word came from on high early the day before: they’re finally going to breach.

  They can’t afford fuckups now.

  They usually run a skeleton crew on the site, especially this late at night, but when the news broke that, after all their months of digging, they were actually going to break through and see what waited for them underneath the desert, the workers started showing up on their own. Not to try to log a few hours of overtime, not even to impress their supervisors—just to see. They’ve all been digging out here for so long that many of them forget what life was like before their shovels bit into dirt. This is what they’ve been working toward for months.

  They wouldn’t miss this for their lives.

  Under the panopticon eye of the central tower, the gathered workers file through the chain-link gates, pushing past each other for a better view of the site proper, steam jetting from their noses and mouths in billowing white rushes. The desert gets cold at night, with snow on the way if the weather outlets are to be trusted. Working in the sand over winter can be a nasty proposition—the snow sucks, but the cold is always worse. It leaves the ground hard as stone, soaks frost and ice into their bones, slows the work to a crawl. But almost none of them notice the freeze tonight; they can barely feel the chill past the electric anxiety that crackles between them, dancing across their collective skin in shallow blue arcs.

  They crowd around the edges of what management’s been calling the Well—the great hole that they all harrowed into the earth in pursuit of … well, what, exactly? Almost none of them know for sure, and the ones that do have been forbidden by frighteningly worded NDAs to say for certain. Security clearance and all that—a real bitch. No matter. They were sent here to dig, so they dug. Simple as that. Never mind the acousticians and sonar techs tracking their every movement and telling them where to excavate next, the tower overseers keeping their eyes narrowed behind plastic safety glasses, the strange static feedback like muffled screams fluttering their radios the deeper they plumb. They’re company men and women to the last, and they know how to shut up and work when they’re told.

  Shoulder to shoulder, the workers flock to the edge of the Well and peer through the consuming darkness that fills it like black water, all the way down to the funnel’s vertex, and the thing they found waiting for them there earlier this week, like a Christmas present left forgotten under the tree. The news traveled fast after they unearthed it. How could something like that not?

  There’s a door in the sand.

  At first they hardly believed it. But then, one by one and group by group, they crept forward and saw it for themselves. It wasn’t a door by any modern definition—a massive stone triangle pressed flat into the earth and buried deep under a thousand feet of frozen-solid Mojave Desert—but there wasn’t any better word to describe it. For days after they uncovered it, they ran test after test to confirm what they already knew as the salient points spread among the workers like wildfire through dry grass: the door was ancient, its carvings remarkably intricate, and whatever hollow network that lay beneath it absolutely massive.

  And now, tonight, after weeks and months of waiting, they’re going to crack it open and see what’s what.

  Underneath the blades of light and the looming night sky, the crowd squeezes in around the chasm, a crown of jumpsuits and helmets and logos nervously shifting its weight back and forth until one breaks from its number: a demolitions engineer, satchel in hand, skidding down, down, down the sand and scree. Under the watch of all, she walks the full perimeter of the triangle door, tracing its labyrinthine patterns with her eyes as she plants the remote charges from her bag at each corner, coordinating over an open channel with the operators in the tower. It’s so quiet down here in the black site’s unburied heart, a natural anechoic chamber. Her pulse drums in her ears, and she has to force herself to breathe slowly as she attaches each charge to the stone, clicking them to life as she goes. The little red lights on the tops of the charges pulse arrhythmically, a strange crimson tremble bouncing from corner to corner. The third charge planted, she backs away from the door, unclipping the radio from her belt as she goes.

  “Ordnance in place and active,” she says into the walkie- talkie, her voice shaky. She watches her words snake around the crowd far above her like a vicious rumor, and when control finally radios back

  “Connection confirmed. Fall back and prepare for breach.” She nearly collapses with relief. She hates being this close to the door. She’s hated it since they first brought her down and ordered her to map the breaching charges to their sonar data. It feels bad, being this
close to it—as if dread was a physical thing that could fill up your lungs and choke the life out of you. It feels like being trapped inside every nightmare she’s ever had. Whatever lies beyond this door, they should not be going down there. But that’s not her call. Not really.

  Slinging the empty satchel over her shoulder, the engineer turns and scrabbles back up the funnel as fast as her hands and legs will carry her. Rejoining the crowd, she nestles herself beside two other engineers she’s friendly with, crossing her arms over her chest as she turns to look back down at the door. It looks so small from up here. How’d they ever find it, buried all the way down there?

  On her hip, her radio crackles and sputters again, static quickly resolving into familiar chatter.

  “Confirm all clear, demolitions.”

  The engineer takes one more long, deliberate look down the Well, trying to keep the growing sense of vertigo at bay. All clear. Her last chance to back out, call it off, delay this somehow—if only for a little while. All around the crowd, faces turn her way, brimming with—what? Excitement? Anticipation? Fear? All three? Looking back at them, she understands that the time to call this off is long, long past. The decision’s already been made, the die cast before the shovels ever hit the sand. If she doesn’t do it, they’ll find someone else who will.

  No sense in prolonging the inevitable now.

  She brings the radio to her lips again, her gaze still fixed on the triangular door. This time, when she speaks, her words are sure and strong, no shake to them at all.

  “All clear confirmed.”

  “Understood. Breaching in ten, nine, eight, seven …”

  The crowd braces as one. Nobody blinks, nobody breathes. The silence at the bottom of the funnel blooms and spreads like some invisible cancer, growing to infect every last one of them with its fearsome totality. They’re not alive, in this moment—they’re not anywhere, they’re not anything. Together as fading ghosts they watch, and they wait, and control counts them down from the safety of the central tower, each tallied second a miserable eternity. And then:

  “… one. Breach.”

  At the bottom of the Well, the charges thump in a single, decisive concussion that the workers feel in their ankles, knees, lungs, and hearts. Sand cascades down the sides of the funnel in crumbling sheets, and for a moment nothing happens. The crowd holds its breath. Nobody speaks. Nobody blinks. And then they all start to hear it: a great brutal cracking, like some colossal tree falling in the distance, out of sight yet horrifyingly loud. The ground rumbles below their feet, as if the world is trying to split itself apart. The door at the bottom of the Well cracks, then tumbles away into the darkness below like it was designed to do exactly that. A second later, they hear the crash of the broken stone hitting the bottom of whatever chamber they’ve cracked open, and a whisper circles through the crowd as they ask themselves Is that it? Is that all?

  They don’t have to wait long to find out.

  Not everyone notices it at the same time. It happens slowly, catching their attention and pulling them in one by one, holding them there, inexplicable, impossible.

  Black smoke, rising in a diffuse column from the chamber below.

  It floats up from the empty doorway in long dark curls that spiral ever inward, slowly coalescing as it spins in place, the patterns within growing more complex by the second. The wind pushes the twisting bulb of smoke back and forth, a misshapen head on a broken pivot, and for the span of a single breath the engineer is sure that she can see her dead mother’s face in its coiling tongues, painted in inky grayscale against the headache-bright spotlights.

  What the hell …?

  Over their heads, the smoke swells and surges across the crowd, spreading wide like vultures’ wings as it falls on them, swirling in between the workers, flooding mouths and nostrils and lungs in a noxious deluge. The engineer’s quicker than most: clapping her hands over her nose and lips, she shoves for the gate, weaving through the hacking, sputtering bodies that surround her. Bile rises in the back of her throat, a bitter battery-acid tang that clings like aerosol. She chokes, she gags, she spits, she keeps pressing forward. Her eyes itch and blur red. Underneath her company-issue jumpsuit, her skin is starting to tingle and ache. Panic buzzes in her head like a fist of bees, and she knows she has to get out of here, right now, away from the smoke, the door, and whatever awaits below. This crowd isn’t a safe place to be right now. Odds are she’s only got seconds left before people start to—

  Across the funnel, someone screams, a sound unlike any she’s ever heard a human being make before. It’s primal, almost animal in its desperation and horror. It shears through her, that sound—it leaves all other thoughts behind. Outside of herself, she turns and looks, and immediately wishes she hadn’t.

  Through the nervous, churning bodies pressing in on her, she can see someone thrashing on the far side of the Well, windmilling their arms in wild circles, thumping knotted fists against their own face as, all around them, other workers recoil and try to clamber away. Another scream rises from the thrashing jumpsuit—impossible to tell who it is from this far off—and then, clawing at their face and throat, they pitch forward, over the edge, into the funnel.

  The crowd holds its breath as the thrashing worker plummets down the rough slope, somersaulting end over end, bouncing off the rocks, leaving bright red stains in their wake. The jumpsuit tears away in crimson ribbons as the worker’s helmet snaps loose and goes skidding away across the uneven, jagged scree.

  They all see it coming, but none of them can do anything about it. So, trapped in horrified silence, they watch.

  The worker skids down the rocks, less a human body now and more a bleeding bag of flesh and bone, toward the gaping black hole at the bottom. For a second it looks like they’re trying to keep themself from plummeting any further, digging their bare hands into the grit and sand as they tumble, but doing so only slashes their hands to tatters. More messy red added to the blur. When the screamer drops into the shadows below, the crowd stays quiet. Nobody cries out, nobody whispers or gasps or moans “oh, Christ!”—they just stand there, dumbfounded and terrified as they watch this person disappear into the earth.

  Then they start to hear it.

  At first it sounds like it’s coming from below, a deep, far-off rumbling that resolves into a great churning mutter that rises and falls like speech, an incantation, a curse. But the murmur isn’t coming from the cavern below. The murmur is inside their heads. Within seconds, none of the workers can hear the people beside them screaming for mercy, pleading, weeping, begging like frightened children. None of them notice when another column of black smoke jets from the bottom of the Well, thicker and darker than the first. It sweeps through the crowd in a horrid wave, pulling at their suits and masks, rocking them back on their heels as they clap their hands to their ears in a futile attempt to stopper back the sound coming from inside their skulls. Beside the engineer, someone shoves someone else, and someone else shoves back. The panicked crowd turns animal, turns in on itself, terrified and furious. Fists start to fly. People start to scream. The roaring grows louder.

  And then everything goes to hell.

  Part One

  THE CLACK

  Jonah

  San Francisco, CA

  1,325 miles to Albuquerque

  Walking a circuit through the bedroom, he went through the list in his head one more time, checking off boxes, making sure he had everything. He’d spent the last week packing all his things up, carefully filing them away in neatly labeled cardboard boxes to be shipped out to New Mexico, where they’d sit in his dad’s third garage bay until Jonah figured out what the hell he was going to do now that his life had completely unraveled.

  Molly had gone last Friday to stay the week at her sister’s place up in Napa, a little place tucked away in the chilly early spring green of the valley. She’d wanted to give him the time and room to get his stuff together at his own pace; they’d already gone through the house at that point, stumbling their way through the awkward, stilted dance of yours-or-mine. Once that was over, Molly had squeezed Jonah’s hand and left, heading north to work remotely and drink wine with Emily and deal with everything in her own way. She’d come back yesterday morning, eyes still as red and puffy as they’d been when she’d left. They hugged, they tried to comfort each other like they’d always used to, but it didn’t work. Not anymore. They were two strangers under the same roof now. Their marriage was a dead furnace, the pilot light long gone out. All that was left to do was for Jonah to make sure he wasn’t leaving anything behind.