The early settlers of New York’s Hudson Valley used to say that a strange kind of magic held sway over Pollepel Island, the kind that made the drunken crewmen of Dutch schooners dropped off there to sober up go mad instead, the kind that made the river currents and winds not merely violent, but malevolent.
Sam Bennett knew, even as a small child, that magic was a word adults sometimes used to explain the unexplainable to children. His own parents used it, with reverence, and perhaps a bit of fear, to explain good fortune. As if they wished or prayed for too much good, the magic would run out.
The existence of “bad” magic apparently never occurred to them. Sam reasoned even then that if there was good and bad luck and good and bad people, surely there was good and bad magic.
Sam had just turned 12 when he saw the island for the first time, and knew that magic, like so many other things from his childhood, was not real. Well, to be fair, he wasn’t sure.
Still he sensed something whenever he looked across at the brooding hump of rock with its ruined castle and crumbling breakwaters. A strangeness. An uneasiness. A feeling that perhaps there was some truth to the stories of it being home to something that the earliest Landing settlers told their children to keep them inside after sunset.
Perhaps magic was the wrong word, for there was another word for what Sam and the Cliffsiders encountered on the island the following summer: monstrous.
Author Notes
Dedication
Prologue – The Lost Alamo
PART I – THE BEGINNING
Newspaper Article – ARMS DEALER TO PURCHASE POLLEPEL ISLAND, RELOCATE ARSENAL
Chapter 1 – Where Mohicans Fear to Sleep
Chapter 2 – A Pleasant Place to Build a Town On (For a Price)
Chapter 3 – For the Greater Good
Chapter 4 – Weed ‘Em & Reap
Newspaper Article – MISSING LANDING HIGH CHEERLEADER FOUND DEAD
PART II – JUNE 1970
Chapter 5 – Sam Bennett
Chapter 6 – Rose Robbins, Part 1
Chapter 7 – Judy Hanley, This is My Girlfriend Patty Hampton … She’s a Ghost
Chapter 8 – An Imaginary Fiend
Chapter 9 – Where Sam Keeps the Hurt
Chapter 10 – Meet the Freak
Chapter 11 – The Bookhouse (Birth of the Cliffsiders)
Chapter 12 – Randy Badook
Chapter 13 – Cookies & Crumbs
Chapter 14 – Charlie Deal’s Dream
Chapter 15 – Mr. Orlando
Chapter 16 – The Lonesome Death of Richie Killian
PART II – JULY 1970
Newspaper Article – CONTROVERSIAL ST. THOMAS TAPESTRY SET ON FIRE; CHURCH DAMAGED
Chapter 17 – The Diversion
Chapter 18 – Cloudy with a Chance of Monsters
Chapter 19 – The House with a Gun In Its Walls
Chapter 20 – Once a Believer, Always a Believer!
Newspaper Article – MISSING KILLIAN BOY SECOND VICTIM OF LANDING KILLER; POLICE BAFFLED
Chapter 21 – Curiouser …
Chapter 22 – … And Curiouser
Chapter 23 – Time to Ask the Ouija Board
Chapter 24 – The Hive
Chapter 25 – The Land Is Dark
Chapter 26 – A Senseless Designated Place
Chapter 27 – I Wouldn’t Believe Us Either
Chapter 28 – The Murderous Shapeshifting Demon Always Rings Twice (But It’s Been Known to Lie)
Newspaper Article – FORMER HOMECOMING QUEEN COMMITS SUICIDE
Chapter 29 – Mr. Kadeeter (‘Tis Part of Its Game to Vary Its Name)
Chapter 30 – Cliffsiders, Assemble!
Chapter 31 – Rhyming the Plan
Chapter 32 – Gulp
PART III – August 15/16, 1970
Chapter 33 – The Raft
Chapter 34 – The Big Dark
Chapter 35 –Blow the Hatch
Chapter 36 – Beneath the Below
Chapter 37 – Not Everyone Gets Out Undead
Chapter 38 – Rose Robbins, Part 2
Chapter 39 – Benedict Friggin’ Arnold
Chapter 40 – The Great Escape
Newspaper Article – BANNERMAN’S CASTLE BURNS FOR THREE DAYS; ARSON SUSPECTED
Chapter 41 – Down the Bolthole!
Chapter 42 – Once More Into the Abyss
Chapter 43 – Vanquished or Vanished?
Chapter 44 – Remember the Alamo!
Epilogue – It Was Over, But, Of Course, It Wasn’t
Newspaper Article – CUB SCOUT TROOP ATTACKED BY WOLF IN STORM KING CLOVE