Innocence dies so easily. Evil lives again . . . and again . . . and again.
One hundred years ago in Port Arbello a pretty little girl began to scream. And struggle. And die. No one heard. No one saw. Just one man whose guilty heart burst in pain as he dashed himself to death in the sea.
Now something peculiar is happening in Port Arbello. The children are disappearing, one by one. An evil history is repeating itself. And one strange, terrified child has ended her silence with a scream that began a hundred years ago.
Thirteen-year-old Angel Sullivan falls in love with her family''s new home-the house that stands at Black Creek Crossing in the small town of Roundtree, Massachusetts. But the idyll is soon shattered as Angel learns a shocking secret about the house. It seems that a double murder took place there, and no one has lived at Black Creek Crossing since.
As Angel and her family begin to confront the mounting perils in their new dwelling, increasingly bizarre events occur in Roundtree: terrible storms strike; seemingly inexplicable "accidents" transpire; and rumors of witchcraft, a phenomenon that figured in the town''s history hundreds of years earlier, begin to resurface....
The sudden, tragic death of her husband leaves Caroline Evans alone in New York City to raise her children with little money and even less hope. When she meets and marries handsome, successful Anthony Fleming, the charismatic man of her dreams, she believes her life is destined for happiness. She and her children move into her new husband's spacious apartment in the legendary Rockwell on Central Park West. Despite her son's instinctive misgivings about the building and its residents, Caroline dismisses the odd behavior of her neighbors as pleasant eccentricities. But after her daughter begins to experience horrifying nightmares and a startling secret emerges, Caroline realizes that the magnificence of her new home masks a secret of unimaginable horror....
Amanda: A century ago, a gentle blind girl walked the cliffs of Paradise Point. Then the children came - taunting, teasing - until she lost her footing and fell, shrieking her rage to the drowning sea...
Michelle: Now Michelle has come from Boston to live in the big house on Paradise Point. She is excited about her new life, ready to make new friends...until a hand reaches out of the swirling mists - the hand of a blind child. She is asking for friendship...seeking revenge...whispering her name...
Cassie Winslow is sixteen. She has just lost her mother in a terrible accident. Now, lonely and frightened, she has come to live with the father she barely knows and his new family in tiny False Harbor on Cape Cod. For Cassie, the strange, unsettling dreams that come to her suddenly in the dead of night are merely the beginning. Very soon, Cassie Winslow will come to know the terrifying powers that are her gift. And in the village of False Harbor, nothing will ever be the same.
The House: Lush and deceptively tranquil, with its pristine beaches and blossoming vegetation, the island basks in splendid isolation off the South Carolina coast. Here, where sudden storms unleash the murderous rage of wind and sea, stands the Devereaux mansion, a once-great plantation house now crumbling amid ancient oaks dripping with Spanish moss. Here, Marguerite Devereaux, fifty and childless, has cast off her dreams to care for her aged, demanding mother.
The Family: Now, for the first time in twenty years, Kevin Devereaux has returned home to this secluded place with his wife and two children. They have come to visit Kevin''s mother - hated, frightening Mother, with her slash of red lipstick, mask of bone-white powder, and a tongue that has always cut to Kevin''s heart...and into his darkest nightmares. She said she was ill - but is that the real reason the old woman summoned the son she has not seen in so many years?
The Horror: Suddenly, horribly, Mother dies inside the locked nursery. And now there will be no escape. For now, all the secrets of this once-proud southern family emerge like tortured spirits from the sinister past to wrap their evil around the unsuspecting children. Until, in the shadowed corridors and dust-covered rooms of this decaying old house, they learn the true terror of The Unloved.
Italy, 1252 Inquisition. Accusation. Fear. Torture. The guilty and the innocent dying for sins real and imagined, in the flames of the burning stake.… Neilsville, 1978Peter Balsam has come to this sleepy desert town to teach its youth, and finds a mystery of mounting horror. Something is happening to the young girls of St. Francis Xavier High School—something evil. In bloodlet and terror a suicide contagion has swept the town…while a dark order of its holy men enacts a secret medieval ritual. Is hysteria manipulating these innocent children into violent self-destruction? Or has a supernatural force, a thirteenth-century madness, returned to…Punish the Sinners?
Something is happening to the children of Eastbury, Massachusetts... Something that causes healthy babies to turn cold in their cribs. Something that strikes at the heart of every parent's darkest fears. Something unexplained that is taking the children, one by one. Sally Montgomery has just lost her beautiful little baby girl. Lucy and Jim Corliss, bitterly divorced, have been reunited by the sudden disappearance of their son. An entire town waits on the edge of panic for the next child to be taken. They all know there must be a reason for the terror. But no one ever expected...The God Project.
The children were waiting. Waiting for centuries. Waiting for someone to hear their cries. Now nine-year-old Christie Lyons has come to live in the house on the hill - the house where no children have lived for fifty years. Now little Christie will sleep in the old-fashioned nursery on the third floor. Now Christie's terror will begin...When the Wind Blows the children must die!
Clark's Harbor was the perfect coastal haven, jealously guarded against outsiders. But now strangers have come to settle there. And a small boy is suddenly free of a frenzy that had gripped him since birth... His sister is haunted by fearful visions... And one by one, in violent, mysterious ways the strangers are dying.
Never the townspeople. Only the strangers. Has a dark bargain been struck between the people of Clark's Harbor and some supernatural force? Or is it the sea itself calling out for human sacrifice? A howling, deadly...Cry for the Strangers.
Brilliant summers amid golden fields. Killing winters of razorlike cold. A peaceful, neighborly village, darkened by legends of death? Who is Nathaniel? For a hundred years, the people of Prairie Bend have whispered the name in wonder and fear. Some say he is simply a folk tale - a legend created to frighten children on cold winter nights. Some swear he is a terrifying spirit returned to avenge the past. And soon...very soon...some will come to believe that Nathaniel lives still - darkly, horrifyingly real. Nathaniel.
For young Michael Hall, newly arrived in isolated Prairie Bend after having lost his father to a sudden tragic accident, Nathaniel is the voice that calls him across the prairie night...the voice that draws him into the shadowy depths of the old, crumbling barn where he has been forbidden to go...the voice - chanting, compelling - he will follow faithfully beyond the edge of terror...Nathaniel.
After years of living in Los Angeles, pretty young widow Karen Spellman and her two daughters are returning to the lush, verdant countryside of Karen's childhood, where she plans to marry her high-school sweetheart. But something sinister awaits the Spellmans. Something so hideous it seems not earthly, but spawned in Hell. Now Karen must protect her daughters from a malign, preternatural force that must satisfy its gruesome thirst for unsuspecting prey . . . .
