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  Devil’s Night

  Penny Wright Series Book 1

  A.N. Willis

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 by A.N. Willis

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of Observatory Books. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please write to [email protected].

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-7343597-7-0

  Produced by Observatory Books

  Denver, Colorado

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  -From A Devil in Eden

  Devil’s Night - 1894

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  -From A Devil in Eden

  Devil’s Night - 1894

  -From A Devil in Eden

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  -From A Devil in Eden

  Devil’s Night - 1894

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  -From A Devil in Eden

  Devil’s Night - 1894

  -From A Devil in Eden

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  -From A Devil in Eden

  Devil’s Night - 1894

  -From A Devil in Eden

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  -From A Devil in Eden

  Devil’s Night - 1894

  -From A Devil in Eden

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  -From A Devil in Eden

  Devil’s Night - 1894

  -From A Devil in Eden

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  -From A Devil in Eden

  Devil’s Night - 1894

  Epilogue

  Also by A.N. Willis

  About the Author

  Five miles west of Ashton, Colorado, nestled into a dead-end canyon at the end of a dirt road, lies the abandoned town of Eden. Once, Eden was a bustling mining enclave, full of men hoping to strike it rich and women dreaming of a better life.

  Then, on July 17, 1894, came the Devil’s Night Massacre.

  Today, Eden is one of the best-preserved ghost towns in the United States. It’s also the most haunted.

  In July 2000, I spent Devil’s Night in Eden to investigate. I wasn’t alone. Working alongside me were the other members of the Ashton Paranormal Society. And we had the services of a talented, if unusual, medium: my five-year-old daughter, Penny.

  -from A DEVIL IN EDEN by Lawrence Wright (Ashton Press, 2001)

  Chapter One

  2019

  The Paradise Hotel was just as Penny Wright remembered it: crumbling red brick, warped wood floors. Thick paper peeled in sheets from the walls, revealing moldering lath and plaster beneath. A few windows still held wavy panes of glass.

  Linden Hao snapped a photo, her phone aimed at a bullet hole in the wood.

  “It’s even creepier than I imagined,” Linden said.

  “But what do you think?” Penny asked.

  “Are you kidding? You were right—it’s perfect.”

  Penny nodded, more to reassure herself than to agree. She’d been working on this project for months, but planning from her desk in Los Angeles was nothing like being here in person. This was the first moment that it all felt real.

  They stood in the hotel’s lobby. All the furniture and opulent fixtures were long gone—maybe pilfered over the decades by visitors who came here to bask in the haunted ambiance.

  Penny had been one of them, years ago. But that had been a different life.

  Most of the buildings on Eden’s Main Street were gutted, rotting, or had fully succumbed to the harsh Colorado winters. But the Paradise had kept a regal sort of beauty, despite its dark history. It was just the place to kick off the festival—assuming they could get all the details finalized in time. But she’d find a way.

  “You did good.” Linden bumped Penny’s shoulder with her fist.

  Penny brushed aside her nervousness and smiled. “Hell yeah, I did.”

  Linden took a hesitant step up the staircase, then came back down. “That doesn’t seem stable, does it?”

  Linden was five-nine and slender, no more than a hundred twenty pounds, most of that her new Patagonia hiking clothes and heavy Columbia boots. They’d landed in Denver yesterday and stopped for the night, making a pilgrimage to the massive REI to pick up gear before dinner in trendy RiNo. In the morning they’d taken a puddle jumper to Montrose and made the hour-and-a-half drive to Ashton, where they swapped out their rental sedan for the waiting Jeep. Then the final bumpy miles to Eden. Yet despite all that, Linden still looked dewy-cheeked, her black hair long and smooth.

  Penny hadn’t fared so well. Her plaid cotton button-down no longer smelled fresh. Sweat plastered her bangs to her forehead. Her stomach wouldn’t settle, though she’d had no appetite for breakfast. But there was also something exhilarating about being here, back in this place she hadn’t set foot in over six years.

  “Excuse me, Ms. Hao?” someone said, poking his head through the hotel’s entrance.

  “Be right there. Hey, Penny? I need to sign some more papers for the contractor.”

  In just over a week, Eden would be the venue for Sterling PR’s biggest event of the year—the launch of a caffeine-laced drink, Dark Energy, for a huge new client. Penny had pitched a three-night music festival culminating on July 17, the 125th anniversary of the notorious Devil’s Night Massacre. It was macabre, and it was more than a little crass. But Penny—and more importantly, the client—knew that it would be social media gold.

  Would Eden’s ghosts make an appearance? Penny had been counting on it. Yet her shoulders were tensed, waiting for the first sign. Ghosts rarely made her nervous. Not anymore. But Eden wasn’t just any place.

  She walked over to the bar, which was off to the right of the lobby. Here the ceiling lowered, and ancient bottles of cloudy glass still stood on a top shelf. Penny put her hands on the bar, the wood oiled smooth by countless hands and spilled glasses of whiskey. She brushed dust from her fingers against her jeans.

  Beyond a carved wooden archway, a single table stood on spindly legs. The dining room. Penny crept closer. A shiver ran up and down her spine as she looked up at the tin ceiling. A gaping, cracked hole showed where the chandelier had been.

  She’d never been to this room before. Her last visit to Eden had been at night, and neither she nor her friends had been brave enough to venture this far. Plus, she’d been…preoccupied that night. She’d still managed to get scared out of her wits and do some other stupid things besides.

  But she knew the story of what had occurre
d here. Ernest Fitzhammer, the owner of the Paradise Hotel, had been found hanging from the chandelier. Penny felt a shift in the air. A hum of electricity increasing in frequency. She flinched, imagining the swing of a man’s body, listing on a frayed rope.

  She was a long way from that eighteen-year-old kid, terrified by what she’d seen in Eden. And she was even further from the five-year-old who’d come to Eden with her dad on Devil’s Night. Ghost girl, the other kids had called her.

  Something moved in the corner of her vision—the doorway across the room.

  It had been a swish of fabric, like a full skirt twirling around legs. A wave of cold moved through her. A chill that began inside of her instead of out.

  She crossed the dining room before she realized she’d moved. She looked into the kitchen. Against the wall sat an iron stove, the plaster blackened from soot. A thin chimney ran from the stove into the roof. Someone had replaced the back door with an incongruous modern version, the deadbolt locked.

  To the left, a hallway. It led into darkness.

  That sense of deep cold remained, that same ever-present hum in the air. Penny backed away as her heart thumped an unsteady beat. The dead had always been clearer to her in Colorado than anywhere else, especially this close to home.

  She focused on closing herself off from these sensations, something she’d learned well in the years she’d been away.

  Ghosts were not conscious. They had no intent, ill or otherwise. They were trapped in a single moment of their greatest regret or fear, and for someone sensitive like Penny, those impressions could become overwhelming. As soon as the construction crew moved in, the thrum of living people would drown out most of these remnants of the dead.

  Of course, Eden would still look like the set of a horror movie. Hopefully, some signs of the haunting would remain. Just enough to give festival-goers the scare they’d be craving.

  “Everything okay?” Linden asked.

  Penny spun around. Linden stood in the middle of the dining room wearing a hard hat. It was orange and slipped a bit to one side. She started fiddling to adjust it.

  “We’re both supposed to be wearing these, apparently,” Linden said. “Insurance.”

  “Right.” Penny forced a smile. “I’m just soaking in the ambiance.”

  “The outside shots have been great, but I can’t believe we almost missed these details.” Linden had made a trip to Eden two months ago for site recon, but Penny hadn’t been able to come. Their planning budget was too tight.

  Linden pulled out her phone again to take a few more snaps. “What should the caption be?”

  Penny swallowed and wrapped her arms around her middle, wishing she could banish the chill. She’d never enjoyed being frightened. To her, ghosts were too real to be funny or exciting. But she wasn’t the target audience. Haunted is exactly what we want, she’d said in her pitch. That was the whole point of hosting their event here—Eden’s reputation. She needed to capture that creeping sensation, bottle it up and make it into something that would sell.

  “This is where it began,” Penny said. “Where they found the first bodies.”

  She pointed at the wall opposite the window. The wallpaper had long since been torn down here, any traces of red gone.

  “The word ‘Marian’ was scrawled there in blood.”

  Bloody Marian. The butcher of Eden.

  Linden pretended to shiver, then smiled mischievously. “I’m in awe of you right now.”

  Penny swatted her arm. “Shush.”

  For much of her life, Penny had lived in the shadow of this place. It was past time that she changed the narrative. Reclaimed Eden for herself.

  If she did things right, this year’s Devil’s Night would be one that nobody would ever forget.

  Chapter Two

  They went back through the lobby toward the hotel’s entrance. “Turns out the general contractor is busy in Ashton today,” Linden said. “Which kinda pissed me off, since he didn’t say a word on the phone yesterday. But that was until I met his foreman. Guy’s a mountain-man hottie.”

  “I didn’t know you had a Paul Bunyan fetish,” Penny said.

  “Quiet.” Linden giggled. “You’re going to diminish my aura of unattainability.”

  They walked down Main Street. The day was already growing hot, sweat trailing down Penny’s back. July in the mountains wasn’t nearly as hot as central LA, but they were at nine thousand feet and the sun could be scorching in the thin air. The town was set into a box canyon between towering sandstone cliffs. Mountain peaks rose in the distance. The view still took Penny’s breath away.

  Once, the town of Eden spread throughout this canyon. But now there was little apart from Main Street. Some buildings had collapsed, barely leaving a hint of what they’d once been. A few of the wooden structures still stood: saloons; a mercantile, where townspeople had bought their flour and mining tools and rough-spun cloth. In the window to the blacksmith’s workshop, you could still see hunks of rusted metal and a black cast-iron furnace where tools were once melted and shaped.

  Then there was the Paradise Hotel, still standing an impressive three stories of brick and stone cornices. The Eden Bank was a twin to the hotel on Main Street’s far end. But a fire decades ago—set by squatters—had gutted it on the inside.

  Teenagers came to Eden to get drunk, and vandals had caused damage or graffitied walls. But somehow, there’d been enough fascination with Eden to keep it standing.

  “There’s the foreman,” Linden whispered, poking Penny in the side. Then Linden straightened, calling out to him. “Matthew, this is Penny Wright. She’s the one who’s really in charge here if anybody asks. And she still needs a hard hat.”

  Penny looked over.

  His sharp features were more filled out than she remembered, yet instantly recognizable. His dirty-blond hair hung over his forehead, his eyes skeptical as he watched her. He was standing with the construction crew, arms crossed, a jean-clad hip cocked out, tan work boots on his feet.

  Matthew Larsen.

  Oh my God, she thought, what is Matthew doing here?

  He grabbed a hard hat from a flatbed and started towards them. Her heart was writhing in her chest, wanting to reach for her former best friend—the first boy she’d ever loved—just as much as it wanted to get the hell out of there.

  “Hello.” Matthew didn’t seem surprised to see her. He held the hat out to her. Penny fit it onto her head. The thing felt heavy, but also reassuring. If only it could cover the rest of her face. She was sure she was blushing underneath her freckles.

  Linden started to introduce him. “Penny, this is—”

  “Matthew Larsen. I know. We’ve met.”

  Your move, she thought.

  “We met a long time ago,” he corrected.

  “Oh.” Linden was glancing between them, trying to read what was being left unsaid. “Good, then.” She lifted her eyebrows at Penny, which clearly meant, You’d better tell me everything.

  Matthew’s gaze was flinty. Like he was annoyed at her. Like he wasn’t the one who’d vanished from her life, ignoring her emails and calls. But that had been “a long time ago,” just like he’d said. They were both grownups, and Matthew had always been responsible. She just needed him to do his job.

  He produced a clipboard. “I hear you’ve got more to add to the project?”

  “Actually, we were hoping our GC would be here,” Penny said. “Is he on his way?”

  “Sully’s back in Ashton, working out some issues that came up with the permitting and inspections.”

  Linden held up a manicured hand. “Wait, what issues? Anvi didn’t mention anything like that.”

  Anvi Narayan—another member of their event team. She’d been in Ashton for several days already, handling legwork and logistics.

  Matthew shrugged. “The electrical’s way behind schedule, as you must’ve heard. We just got the new electrician up here a few days ago. Sully will know more. As for the permit, I’m not sure. Rig
ht now Sully’s meeting with Harry Wright. Um…” He nodded at Penny.

  “My Uncle Harry,” Penny said. “Remember?”

  “Our inside man.” Linden sighed, taking off the hard hat. “I need to make some calls and talk to Anvi. Penny, can you handle the walk-through with Matthew? I’ll let you know what I find out. And call your uncle when you have a chance.”

  Linden strode toward the trailer, phone in her hand.

  Penny crossed her arms, scuffing her hiking boot in the dust. Matthew tapped on his clipboard, waiting for her to say something.

  It wasn’t that she’d forgotten about him. Quite the opposite. She’d spent plenty of sleepless hours thinking of Matthew since dreaming up Devil’s Fest.

  The last night she’d seen him had been right here—in Eden. One of the best and worst nights of her life.

  But eight thousand people lived in Ashton. She’d assumed Matthew would continue avoiding her and that she would do the same.

  So why was he here?