We're delighted to present an extract from A Game Of Ghosts, the new novel from Irish crime master John Connolly, featuring troubled private investigator Charlie Parker.
It is deep winter. The darkness is unending.
The private detective named Jaycob Eklund has vanished, and Charlie Parker is dispatched to track him down. Parker's employer, Edgar Ross, an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has his own reasons for wanting Eklund found.
Eklund is no ordinary investigator. He is obsessively tracking a series of homicides and disappearances, each linked to reports of hauntings. Now Parker will be drawn into Eklund's world, a realm in which the monstrous Mother rules a crumbling criminal empire, in which men strike bargains with angels, and in which the innocent and guilty alike are pawns in a game of ghosts . . .
The boy’s name was Alex MacKinnon. His family was of Scottish ancestry on one side, and proclaimed it at every opportunity, although no immediate member had set foot in the old country since the beginning of the previous century.
Alex was twelve, and had only recently begun cycling to and from school, with his mother’s reluctant permission, although it was a freedom he had been given ample cause to regret over the course of winter. Yet only the worst of the weather forced him to abandon his bicycle. He was not about to let the elements undo, even temporarily, such a hard-won concession.
His bike had lights on both the front and back. He wore a reflective vest with a blinking red LED on the left sleeve, and another LED on the back of his helmet. He considered himself to be so well lit that a motorist would be more likely to collide with a fully decorated Christmas tree than hit him. On the other hand, the daylight was already fading as he left school, and although it was less than a mile from the school gates to his door, there were dark patches along the road, mostly where the woods lay.
That was where Alex saw the man, or what might once have been a man. He was dressed in black, but his head was bare despite the cold, revealing a bald pate fringed in red, the color of his hair matching that of his beard, which ran like the strap of a helmet from ear to ear.
He was walking parallel to the road on a bank of thick snow. The sight of someone marching bareheaded through the trees would have been unusual enough at this time of year, because a cold wind was blowing, and the drifts hid hollows and tree roots, so it was easy to misstep and take a fall. But what made this particular individual even more distinctive, and caused Alex to veer into a ditch, spilling him from his saddle, was that he was not walking through the snow but over it: his shoes were clearly visible when he should have been buried in white almost to his knees. It was also clear to Alex, even in this poor light, that the man was leaving no footprints, not a one.
Alex lay on his back, the front wheel of his bicycle still spinning beside him. He hadn’t hurt himself in the fall, but the air had been knocked out of him. More to the point, he was scared shitless.
The man stopped walking, frozen in midstep, like a hunter alerted to the presence of a deer. For a moment he remained entirely still, until his attention slowly began to shift in Alex’s direction. His features were smudged and indistinct, as though a thumb had smeared itself across an ink drawing of a face. His head tilted slightly to one side, taking in the boy and his bicycle, then—
Well, Alex could only describe him as turning in upon himself. The man pivoted on his right foot so that his right side was now toward Alex, then took a step forward and was gone, leaving no sign that he had ever been there to begin with.
Alex scrambled to his feet, grabbed his bicycle, and made a running start along the road. He didn’t look back. He didn’t dare. And although he had never seen this apparition before, still he knew it for what it was, because he’d heard his father whisper to his mother of just such a figure, when his father thought he was going mad.
The Brethren shadowed Alex through the forest, watching him from the trees. Another haunting had begun.
A Game of Ghosts (published by Hodder & Stoughton) is out now.
