The King of Nightmare

The Strange Souls of the Taylor Point House

I'm Miss Teedee, and I feed the soul sick and the wayward lost at The Taylor Point Inn. Folks like poor Helen who has lost her mind. She goes on about frightful creatures in another world only she can see. She says if we don't help them, it'll be the end of all of us.

Crazy thing is, I'm starting to believe her, which means we have to help because I can't die, yet. I have penance to pay. Starting with the boy on the beach.

~*~

I'm Jason Hart, and I've been on the run for two years, and I'm ready to lie down and let the end find me. But I met a woman who told me there's a job and a place for me at this Inn. Maybe it'll work out. Maybe I won't ruin even more lives. I want to believe her. But I'm so hungry. And that woman over there, she's so beautiful.

~*~

I'm Madeline, but all you'll remember of me is my face and lips and hands and hips and my scent on your sheets the morning after. Oh, and that story you heard - about how I came out of the woods wearing a dead girl's body? You won't want to believe it, but it's true.

And I can hear my Blue - my love, my only. He's calling, but I can't find him. And the more I look, the more I see the shadows moving out of the corner of my eye.

They're coming for me.

~*~

I am Mal'uud 'au Keen of Via'rre, the world that links all worlds. In the language of Fear, my name means, He Who Walks. I am the King of Nightmare. My world crumbles, ravaged by beasts so wretched that not even my Undermaze can contain them.

The last of my brethren, the Walkers of the Veil, and I must find the cause of the Horrors which rend our world to fragments, else the shadows and the fire consume all that remains. Including me.

Including you.

~*~ 

From Hardcover Edition 

A long time ago, Miss Teedee did something so unspeakable that she vows to do penance for the rest of her life.

A large part of Darryl died when his wife did, twenty years ago, and he knows if he keeps eying the liquor, sooner or later, he'll drown in its siren song.

Monica scrubs the Inn from top to bottom every day, but she'll never clean enough to rinse away the past she desperately wishes she could forget.

Andrew, Monica's son, knows all the names of the trees and insects in the garden, and his green thumb can make anything grow - except, he fears, the love he so desperately wants.

Mercutio tries to give the best care possible to his charge, Helen, Darryl's daughter, who can hear whispers coming from the cracks between worlds. The whispers tell her stories of gods and chaos and an imbalance which threatens the lives of every living being in every world and dimension in existence. The people of the Taylor Point House are pivotal in the fight for balance and survival, and Helen waits for the moment to act, knowing they ar...