(As best I can figure out, we’re close to releasing my next novel, Death’s Doors. To whet your appetite, here’s a snippet. lw)

PROLOGUE

We have no use for barns anymore, but are ashamed to tear them down. So the lofted sheds stand here and there across the land on derelict farmsteads, redundant, their backs swayed like old horses’.

The woman tossed her cigarette away. It arced like comet spit in the dark. She went into the ruined barn through a dutch door, pulling open first the upper panel, then the lower. The granulated hinges screamed and the bottom scraped an arc in the earth. She was afraid the noise would wake the baby she cradled in her left arm, but it did not. Such a good baby.

The law said she could be rid of a baby up to the age of eight weeks. She would never have let this one go except for something like this – something terribly, cosmically important.

Her flashlight showed her a low-ceilinged side-shed with animal stalls along its inside wall, its dividers and wooden posts scaly with brown flakes of ancient, petrified manure.

The old woman she’d come to see sat so still that she overshot her with the flashlight beam and had to back it up. Once fixed by the beam, the old woman smiled – a smile of radiant beauty that brought to mind a Renaissance Madonna gone wrinkled and white-haired.

“You – you’re the one I was to meet?” the younger woman asked.

“I am, child. Don’t shine the light in my eyes, please.”

“You can give me the Key?”

“That I can.”

“But you – you look so kind!”

“I would hope I am, child.” The old woman’s blue eyes radiated pure pity – the pity of one who has lived long, and done all things, and gained infinite understanding through experience.

“Then – then you’ll accept some other price! You’re too good to ask this. I can see that.”

The gentle eyes held hers with empathy more than mortal. “Give me the child, Child. ʼTis the easiest way.”

“No! No! You’re merciful. I see that. You’ll take some other price. You’ll take money, or let me be your slave, or – something. You won’t ask this. You can’t. I know you can’t.”

The old woman held her hands out, smiling. “Give it over, there’s a good child.”

Her body racked with sobs, the woman gave her baby up. Made clumsy with weeping, she dropped her flashlight. It went out striking the concrete floor, dilating the darkness about them.

She felt something smooth and warm pressed against the palm of her hand. “Good girl,” said the old woman’s voice. “Here is the Key, as we promised.”

She groped for her flashlight and found it. She lurched out the door, bumping her shoulder against the frame, the useless flashlight in one hand, the Key in the other.

But the world she found outside was not the one from which she’d come.