Publication Day for To Keep Silent by Thomas Sachs
Just in time for Halloween, today’s the publication date for the debut occult horror novel by Thomas Sachs, To Keep Silent.
To Keep Silent tells the story of Nick Coultas, a man desperate to find out what happened to the love of his life, Floriana. She showed him magic, took him with her to Europe, and opened up his mind to a strange and fascinating new world.
But then she disappeared without a trace.
With only a list of names and old addresses of people she knew, and an old grimoire with a blacked-out engraving on one of the pages, Nick will do anything to find out where she went. But those who know won’t — cannot — tell him, because someone wants them to keep silent.
To Keep Silent is available in print, digital, and kindle editions. And to celebrate its release, we’re publishing a chapter from the chilling novel. In this excerpt, a former friend of Floriana, Hakim, tries to find peace after his being confronted by Nick. But peace will not come…
Hakim couldn’t focus on dinner and headed outside as soon as the girls went to bed, thinking maybe some fresh air would help his headache.
Danta had planted a night-blooming jasmine outside the kitchen window, and its smell usually drifted indolently through the dusk air, a token example of her home-making and level, open-hearted energy. Hakim breathed in to try to catch its scent, but tonight he only smelled a sulphurous rot that hastened him to his workshop.
He’d been early that night to the ritual despite his intense doubts. Those same doubts returned tonight on tenebrous wings. He fumbled through his cargo pants for a lighter and its plastic certainty. It sparked briefly, illuminating the room. He crossed to the wall and turned on some lights, chuckling at what he’d told Nick. The harsh halogen left no refuge for malignant shadows to propagate, and he felt better under its beam, opening a cabinet where he kept his stash and papers.
He had the joint hanging from his lips when the lights went out. He rolled his thumb over the wheel, again and again, until finally it sparked. The flame danced in his jittering hands as the paper caught, and he used the burning end to find his way in the dark. When he lit a candle, his head throbbed with the flaring light. He used that candle to ignite another candle, then used that candle to light another. Despite their light, the dark of the room amplified — just like it had outside the circle that night.
Hakim had been the first one there. The drive was strange and long, cruise control at eighty-five untouched for the final two hours of the trip. The location of the place was in the middle of flat plains, totally barren surroundings. Then, in the far distance, he’d seen a lone stand of trees. When he’d finally pulled into the parking lot next to the decrepit building, he wondered what the fuck he was doing out here with these white people.
The second car arrived shortly after he did, with Jared, Brock, and some guy he’d never met before. Jared had greeted him with their usual handshake, and they’d started hauling boxes from the back of Jared’s car towards the front door.
“We’re the first ones here, I guess,” Hakim had said.
“Typical,” said Brocken. “You got the keys?”
“Someone’s actually locking this place up?” the other guy asked.
Hakim fumbled with the key ring that Flor had been very serious about giving him, trying different keys in the first lock. One finally fit, and the lock clicked open. He grabbed the ornate handle and pushed, but the door didn’t budge.
“Another lock right there,” Brocken said, pointing to an older-looking keyhole below the first. Hakim found the right key, turned the lock, and tried the door again. This time, he pushed it with his shoulder. It didn’t move, so he tried again, more aggressively.
“Bro, what the fuck?” Hakim said, stepping back. They all looked at the door, and then Jared pointed to another lock about a foot from the ground.
“Right there, at the bottom,” Jared said. “A door for the gnomes, man.”
Hakim knelt down and searched the keys again. When the lock slid free, it made a sound like finally getting a foot into a tight shoe. Hakim stood up, grabbed the handle, and looked at it, then put his shoulder to the door, stumbling a bit as the door slid easily inwards.
Together with the others, he peered through the doorway. The darkness inside aspirated, expanding and contracting, but he told himself his eyes were just adjusting.
“Don’t just fuckin’ stand there, guys, hand me a candle.”
Jackie and Horace pulled up in Jackie’s car right before they entered. Jackie had been frazzled by the drive, thinking she’d gotten lost. Hakim gave her a big hug and felt her calm a bit, glad to see her smile. Something about that smile tempered the building’s grim aura. The building only had two rooms: the first was large and circular, with dirty slate floors, rounded walls, and an actively splintering wood door on the far side. They continued hauling in the boxes and setting them right inside the entrance of the triple locked door, and then the other guy — introduced as Mike — helped Jared carry the last thing in, a large and very heavy hard-leather case.
Mike had let his side drop, and Jackie had very sternly admonished him to be more careful. “All of this is custom-made, brought in from Italy and other places. These are religious objects. Do try and treat them as such.”
“She brought all this back from Italy?” Hakim asked as he opened the latches. He unwrapped the black silk coverings, astonished at the beauty of the wrought metal underneath.
“This all bronze?” Brocken asked in turn, tapping the edge of his gold ring on the metal, which clanged shrilly.
“I think some of it’s gold,” Jared answered, and then gestured towards the inner door. It opened, with no keys or sound, to a room nearly identical to the first, this one with squared-off walls and warmer, mustier air.
From their silence, Hakim could tell the others were also trying to adjust to the strange vertigo that warped over the threshold. Jared and Mike had both gone back to grab candles whose shine had been lessened by the way their hands were shaking. Even now, safe with time’s distance and the bright lights of the shed, Hakim could feel the creep of the sensation, and his head swam with the memory.
At Flor’s instruction, once the room had been lit, Hakim was to be left alone to set the circle. He’d almost asked if the others would stay, but Jared had hustled them out; something about Jared trusting him had given Hakim the confidence to begin. Three-quarters of the way around the cast circle, the boundaries began to take and shift the air into more positive possibilities. The doubts had started to give way to his assurance and self-confidence until he looked back to the eastern quadrant and saw wet footprints.
Hakim turned himself back to west, his heart loud in his ears. The south edge had the same footprints, but thicker and more pronounced. His suddenly dry mouth and throat croaked out the rest of the words of the banishing.
Hakim’s right temple pounded now, remembering the way he had willed himself to continue, almost sprinting out of the room and forcing himself not to look back when he’d finished.
When he had gotten back to the others, Flor was there. He tried to play it cool in front of her, consciously forcing his eyes half-shut so no one would notice how wide they’d become once he’d seen that the footprints had followed him out.
He had thought the responsible thing to do was just to say it; to tell them, in case something dangerous was going on. But then, after rubbing his hands on his robe, he saw wet imprints. The soles of his feet felt cold and damp — he touched one of them and laughed: he’d made the tracks himself. When Jackie looked at him with the question in her face, he’d told the group about the footprints, and their chuckles quieted the tense air, lending a bit of ease to the atmosphere.
Hakim was still astonished at how quickly everything had deteriorated from there.
Before that night, he’d been practicing the occult for almost two decades and had seen all kinds of things: the demons of Solomon brought to visible appearance, angelic miracles honed through dreams. He’d seen physical, rippling electricity in the strange vistas of the Enochian Aethyrs, elementals dancing around him in the dark woods of national park campsites, and had far too many meetings in random hotel rooms with channeling cults. What had bubbled from Flor’s mouth that night was just another in the long line of surprises magic had wrought, but he’d suspected it was fake. Sure, she had flailed a bit, putting on quite a good show — the ardor was as strong as he’d ever felt in ritual.
But he’d never seen anything like the shimmer.
He’d watched — and would never forget as long as he lived — something scintillating leave Flor and ascend towards the blurry black as it drank of her. And the next thing Hakim had seen was her body, withering like a time-lapse of drying fruit. He’d felt his mind slip then, felt himself almost lose it. The adrenaline kept him centered as they’d fled, but the long drive home had been a contest of his sanity.
The day after had almost been worse. He’d sat alone in his apartment and stared at the walls, catatonic. When the fugue finally abated, he was hungry, found nothing but some old pancake mix in the pantry, and a jar of pickles in the fridge. He was two and a half aisles into shopping before the flint banality of the grocery store collided with the horror of what he’d seen. He escaped through the automatic doors before his psyche fragmented.
The strawberries he’d walked out with were completely molded when he woke the next day. In his involuntarily fasted state, he had logged on to his computer and thrown his rent money into stocks he’d selected by throwing a tarot spread. Looking back now, the subconscious attempt at self-destruction was clear to him, but a week later, one of the computer companies he’d invested in hit some kind of milestone in its search engine development. It closed on Thursday at a record-breaking high. The pundits were baffled. On Friday morning, Hakim woke up rich.
And then he threw himself headlong into the abyss of work. He invested, built up his portfolio, bought one property after another. Nothing ever went wrong. His investments grew, he knew when to sell, never had anything bottom-out on him. But no matter how big his bedrooms got or how beautiful the views they overlooked, he couldn’t sleep. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw her leaving, watched her wither, crumple, implode in huge explosions of dust, and she cried and wept and screamed for him to help.
In the following months and then years, he tried everything: therapists, treatment, medication, spiritual baths, banishing rituals, whatever he could find. With some of his new money, he bribed the local Cardinal into Catholic exorcism. After three days of intensive prayers and rites, the priests left his sprawling house, shaking their heads, the brake-lights of their new Cadillacs bright against the dawn.
He flew to Brazil for an initiation into Quimbanda, but the Tata rejected him. “Too dark,” the Tata had said, and Hakim knew he wasn’t referencing his skin color. Dejected in São Paulo/Guarulhos International Airport, he bought another ticket to Nepal, but found only Buddhist teachers with nothing more to offer than “Life is Suffering.” Little did they know how long the suffering could actually continue.
At a dive bar one night, six months after he returned, his waitress introduced herself as Danta. When he’d looked into the green eyes, bright beneath her curly black hair, he’d felt a wave of calm wash over him for the first time in years. He took her out after her shift, and they’d walked aimlessly. Her voice was honey, and he held her hand like he was about to fall off a cliff. He proposed in the morning as they watched the sun come up on the beach. The first time she slept beside him in bed was the first time he slept through the night since the ritual.
It didn’t stick, though. He built Danta her dream house, and they’d started their family, but sleep was still fleeting, interrupted by week-long periods of insomnia where he’d wander through this huge house and across the beautiful orchards and gardens, wondering if he’d give it all back if it would make Flor stop begging him to save her.
Now, stoned in the dark room of his workshop lit by candles that gave hardly any illumination, Hakim tried to look around at all that he’d gained: this property, his family, this life. He stood up and found himself staring into a cabinet at a square wrapped in black silk. Blinking the dryness from his eyes made his head hurt worse. His fingers ran across the silk and undraped it, revealing the binding of the book. Then, before he could stop them, his hands opened to the page of the figure he’d never wanted to see again.
The crude woodblock picture of the figure wasn’t blacked out in his copy, nor was the text beneath it, just a few lines explaining who it was, what it did, and what it would offer. Panic leapt through his body, knocking the wind out of him. His clenched jaw shot another wave of pain up his neck and into his head. He felt for the locus of the headache, rubbed it, and felt something less like a bump and more like a growing horn. The darkness of the shed folded around him like hateful origami.
Hakim struggled to control his breath and willed himself to shut the book. Mercifully, his hand obeyed, and the book dropped to the ground. Hakim thought to flee, to tear out of the workshop and find Nick and beat him to death for showing up, to wake his wife and tell her everything. She’d know what to do, how to save him now, the same way she’d always known how to save him, but then he stopped and tried the lighter again. To his surprise, it worked, and he picked up the book, opened it to the page, and held the flame to it.
The paper blazed and the book caught. Hakim dropped it on the floor and listened to the snakeskin cover crackle as the fire licked it. He kicked the book into the center of the room, watched it burn on the bare concrete. The fire intensified as it consumed more of the paper, and he couldn’t help but see the building that night as they’d fled. When it died down a bit, he kicked the remaining unburned parts into a pile, the final fuel jumping with the hot light. When he was sure that nothing of the spirit list remained, he swept the ashes into a tidy pile and left the shed. He walked to the far end of his property, to the liminal edge marked by the fence, and threw the charred remnants towards the north.
He then took his clothes off outside, meditated, and returned to the house. He took an ibuprofen for his headache and tried not to keep touching the bump on his head, then crawled quietly into bed next to his sleeping wife.
When his head hit the Egyptian cotton pillow case, the top of his skull throbbed, radiating fibers of ache down into his back. When he tried to sit up and go to the medicine cabinet for more pills, he couldn’t. He looked sideways to his sleeping wife and was trying to reach out to her, to wake her up for help, when the room went dark with the same inky black he had seen twice now; the first time outside the circle, then in his wizard workshop a few hours ago.
A rush of sharp discomfort cascaded down the front of his forehead and made his jaw clench. The pain panicked his body, and Hakim grabbed for the sheets, slapped around, hoping the movement would wake his wife. The skin of his neck tightened as he was lifted from his scruff like a puppy. The cone rising from the top of his head rubbed against the headboard, his face pulling backwards tighter and harder. He had the image of something sucking on the back of his head; he tried to scream, but the stretched skin held his mouth open like a vise.
With a muffled sound like a cotton shirt tearing, he was drawn backwards and up with another painful yank. He was looking down at his body, watching his hands clawing for anything they could grip. His taut skin, released now, had been stretched like taffy. It lay atop his shoulders in brown folds and, underneath, through a flap in the slackening skin, his eyes were wild in their sockets. He thought of meatballs hidden under twisting strands of nightmare spaghetti.
A tunnel was closing around him. Through the darkening orifice, he searched for the blood that was surely spraying the walls, soaking Danta, waking her. Any moment now, she would be up, she would see what was happening, she would reach for him.
The rest of Hakim’s body, from the collarbones down, was desiccating. His wife, sleeping soundly next to a mummifying corpse, snored peacefully. His hands reached for the round walls of the closing tunnel, desperate to pull himself back through. He tensed his core to propel himself; nothing happened. The anger and helplessness brought him to shouting, and then screaming, a high-pitched sound so desperate and so feral that he was shocked to hear it, stupidly fearful that it would wake his daughters. But maybe if he woke them, they would come running in, see what was happening, and wake Danta. So he shrieked, he screamed, he begged and cried and screamed.
Danta only rolled over, her body stilling in the onset of deeper sleep.
What would happen when she woke up, rolled over, and put her warm, slumber-heavy hands across his ribs, wondered why his skin felt like that, so wrinkled and dry? What would happen when his daughters bounced into his room and jumped on him? He thought of Flor, of seeing her, how long he’d thought about it, how many days and nights he’d lost to horrific visions. His sweet babies, seeing him like that, how long would they have to live with it? He couldn’t help them now; he wouldn’t be able to reach through and help them in any way.
Not where he was going.
“I didn’t say anything to anyone!” he shouted. “I never said your name! I never said any—!” and then, the tunnel closed.
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