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THE HOUNDS OF ELKHORN! Are they somehow actual dogs? Or ghost animals, spirits, even demons from the Underworld? In idyllic Estes Park, Colorado, also home to the famous Stanley Hotel, there is an older and perhaps more seriously haunted venue called Elkhorn Lodge.

In 1984, at a time when the majestic old resort Elkhorn Lodge has almost been forgotten, something reawakens, and forces far darker, far older than the alpine village itself begin to re-emerge…

What deadly secrets lurk within the Lodge, or underneath it, even today?

A sample of the newly published novel:

Prologue

Winter, 1983-4

The Coming of the Hounds

August, 1886

Longs Peak already wore a dazzling white shawl of fresh snow, the young Earl of Sunclyft noted as his dappled mare trotted along a loosely sketched trail beside the Fall River. Summer had grown full and round in these majestic Rocky Mountains of Colorado, where it brought peaceful mornings tinged by a slight haze. Hummingbirds still buzzed about prolific wildflowers, though evening air held a distinct chill that meant these tiny birds would soon begin their annual migration to the distant south.

The man remained blissfully unaware of the horrors about to erupt into his life.

This North American wilderness had successfully seduced his senses. Robert Pennmarten Windermere never before felt so keenly, so vibrantly alive. He held the reins in one kid-gloved hand with an effortless calm, through which his mount obeyed his will as surely as if they were a centaur—man and horse merged as one creature. He sat erect, in fact smoothly posted with the gait in a poised manner that effortlessly strengthened his lean legs. He comprised a slim figure in his riding pants, tall brown boots, a white silk shirt buttoned at the throat with an Indian Ocean pearl clasp. Over all of this, a long black waistcoat of cashmere wool belted by a crimson sash.

The young Earl appeared a refined and somewhat aloof person, his features as noble as his name, with narrow nose, strong chin and dark wavy hair. The full black mustaches were groomed just long enough to sweep up in little wings at the corners of the mouth. His eyes a vivid icy blue, flashed keen confidence upon all that he surveyed.

He could imagine settling into this place for quite a long spell—if only this place could belong to him, could come to bear his family’s distinguished name.

“Robin,” as only his closest friends, his intimates back in England ever called him, had learned here many things he never imagined doing, such as how to expertly chop and stack wood for the fireplace and stove with an axe, how to clean, gut, skin and dress an elk. Further, he had bathed in the frigid mountain streams with other men. This place had changed him quite radically. His embrace of it tended in the direction of ownership.

Now the nobleman’s eyes drank in the red-hot hue of nearly an acre of Indian Paintbrush in bloom on a slope just across the river, a remarkable sight that stunned his mind, caused his sensitive soul to overflow. The haunting voices of magpies and ravens called from ponderosa-to-ponderosa. The Earl reined in his obedient mount, thus they returned in a half circle to where they halted.

Together man and horse gazed over the lovely valley east of their vantage, a great open meadowland and marsh, the geological tribute of glaciers that lingered in traces among the high peaks behind them, though the ice had retreated millennia before. Those ancient rivers of ice had carved out these canyons and valleys, left moraines—ridges of rocky rubble—while they made their final retreat. In the immense near silence, broken only by the chatter of birds, sometimes the mysterious chuckle of falling rock or the loud whisper of rushing waters, the man’s eyes narrowed as he studied forested spurs of granite beneath a few fat unhurried clouds of blinding white upon Holy Virgin blue.

He wondered, so close to speaking aloud that his lips moved slightly beneath the poised wings of his mustaches—wondered if such spectacular natural beauty, such tranquility could possibly exist without some unexpected undercurrents of danger, of Ancient Evil that was supposed to lurk inherent within all of Nature? The Enemy?

He truly could not imagine anything unholy in this place, aside from some unknown human elements. His early Anglican training, plus the influence of a uniquely repressed nursemaid in his boyhood caused him to consider carefully. He shuddered.

A bluebird flashed indigo wings across the canyon where man and animal stood transfixed, as if in a dream.

Pennmarten inhaled deeply of the crystalline air. He held his breath in until he could no longer, while an ominous pounding like a pack of padded feet began to thunder distinctly in his ears. He exhaled with a deep sigh, then closed his eyes, in an attempt to master powerful emotions. From whence came such curious notions, this doubt concerning the holiness and purity of such natural splendor? He felt like Jacob wrestling the angel… so where was that spiral stair connecting all things below and above?

Surely—now he shook his tousled head slowly—there could be no evil in such an unspoiled, paradisiac place as this, not unless it was something known within himself, some personal blot upon the shimmering field of his tender conscience…

Or could it have to do with that uncanny and remarkable Mrs. Jamison?

He gazed down at his gloved hands, which should have been those of an artist or a musician, though he found that he rather liked the burgeoning calluses upon fingers and palms, from labors his associates back in the Old World would have scorned, calluses he relished for their novelty. Indeed, he possessed the talent, the sensibility for the arts as his early schooling demonstrated, while inherited wealth and position made it all too easy to purchase amusement and adventure vicariously.

Now the heart that beat steadily in his chest felt riven.

It seemed he bled down his body onto the saddle and the horse, so great was the pain that fully returned to him now, from the brief respite of distraction. Just when he thought he had grown totally detached from such base human needs, he felt forced to confront his old nemesis: the demon, Love!

Confidence be damned! He nearly laughed aloud at his own melodrama.

A breeze that brushed through pillars of the resinous pines brought him a timeless fragrance of incense. His foolish heart had now compromised the natural beauty’s seductive power over him.

Below him on a flat area by a bend of the river, on the southern bank of the Fall River lined by ruddy willow bushes stood the primary structure of Elkhorn Ranch. This Ranch House was no more than a nine-room frame building with two more rooms upstairs at the southern end. Beyond it, further south stood perhaps a score of small cabins scattered upon a steep slope at the foot of Deer Mountain. Near their west end stood a small building, newly finished this year, that served as the first school for the village. Quite often he heard the shrill voices of children during their play periods outside, and the clang of the hand bell when the school mistress called them back inside to their studies.

At present he himself occupied just two rooms at the north end of the Ranch House. Several tents, and a large canvas pavilion stood pitched between the house and the cabins, and smoke unraveled from several chimneys and fires, farther west, downhill closer to the river’s bend, a barn and livery stable abutted the large corral where horses stood or meandered. Between the Ranch House and the little schoolhouse at the foot of Deer Ridge, on a low rise stood a scattering of trees: firs and ponderosas.

His eyes followed a dirt track that led parallel to the river from the ranch property, then became a street named Elkhorn Avenue leading into the village of Estes Park itself, just past a river bend. That little town, which also held a fond place in his heart already, consisted of no more than a handful of livery stables, several ambitious wooden hotels, and a scattering of homesteads along a marshy meadow by this same river, where it converged with another flow called the Big Thompson River.

The rustic community offered few amenities, hosted some wild characters, and was characterized by a strong odor of manure, along with abundant horseflies.

Pennmarten had spent most of the summer—since early June when he arrived—at Elkhorn Ranch. He availed himself of his hosts, Mr. Daniel Hood and his wife Flora, for all of his needs. He could afford their best hospitality and travelled with three personal servants, who required quarters of their own apart from his. As proprietors of the accommodations the Hoods had done surprisingly well for him—with Mrs. Jamison’s expert help, of course.

“Lordship,” the three male servants that came with him from England still called him, faithful retainers all, however Pennmarten felt himself “modern” not to expect such language from his new American acquaintances, plus he had learned how awkward, ignorant, and sometimes resistant American proved in this matter.

He spent the days, the weeks, indolently, hunting or rambling in the exquisite canyons and gorges. Sometimes he stared into pristine alpine lakes for hours on end. In fact, he enjoyed more solitude during this period than ever before in his entire existence. His senses and perceptions seemed purified, cleansed of certain kinds of civilized artifice and compromise.

This had all felt quite exquisite until—surprising himself!—he discovered that he very much loved someone else, while he despised himself, he felt horribly wicked for the disparity of emotions. Pennmarten had been raised and educated within a formal boy’s school system that sought to narrow its victims, to prepare them for specified roles with appropriate prejudices. The system sought to dehumanize them to the extent required to fulfill their careers, thus the education isolated common feelings within manageable parameters of denial.

Since his graduation, rather that pursue a college career, as a delay tactic at the very least, he employed his wealth and privilege to broaden his perspectives with travel. He had shattered all of his preconceptions about the general nature of humanity during journeys to the Far East, primarily amid the gaudy contrasts of fabled India. Then on the return towards home, he spent some months in Ottoman Egypt, which seemed to him haunted by enigmas largely forgotten and explicitly undead, yet profoundly mysterious. The humanity could still be seen in both relics of the past and the present lives of the people, though it remained unavailable to him in each case identically.

The superiority he had always been taught he possessed remained a barrier.

Only now he had at last come alive in new and unexpected ways without being forced to discard his own heritage, in the American West: Colorado! No previous experiences could have prepared him for the chaste, magnificent terrain of the Rocky Mountains.

Presently, in the midst of muted and uncertain consideration, Pennmarten began to hear something that lay below the conscious threshold of his mind. Reacting without really thinking, he flicked his wrist to gently tug the reins, and nudged a boot heel to indicate to his mount that he wished to go downslope on the trail they had earlier ascended. Thus without specific purpose they trotted through the afternoon light; butterflies flashed their last swirls of the season; the river tumbled with a hiss of rocks and poured into deeper pools. He fought the sudden clearer foreboding that sought to clutch his heart amid the potent ambience of the place.

An irrational dread trickled upward from the saddle, through his groin, into his belly.

On top of the mare, which he whimsically considered a sort of friend by now, the Earl trotted down the trail and slowed to splash across a wide, shallow ford of the river. He allowed his mount to find her footing carefully, then emerged onto a spread of level soil that led to the sandy bank where the barn stood, and approached the split-rail corral.

By the hitching posts in front of the barn, he spied the French wrangler Devereaux astride a nervous palomino. He knew Devereaux as a stinky, unwashed man with an unshaven face, hardly more than a boy really, whose furtive eyes made him suspicious of the man’s past; still, their mutual dislike and differences had never come to the fore. The French-Canadian cowboy was of a low class, uneducated and not worthy of his contempt, though of course, Devereaux’s remarkable way with horses counted as a distinct asset to the stables of the lodge. The mounts and the wrangler shared their animal nature, in a manner that excluded the cultured Englishman.

As the Earl trotted alongside the corral, he heard a melodious baying of excited hounds on the hunt, from the higher ground west of the barn. He recognized the noble voices of the dogs that he himself had bred and trained, two of them bear hunting hounds, the rest fox hounds, and he took great trouble to bring across the ocean. This pack had been raised together. The animals represented his pride and joy, brought all the way from England for the unsurpassed sport to be found in the Rockies.

The lyrical canine song of pursuit approached swiftly through the trees of Deer Ridge: the sound carried something truly savage that he had never heard from them before, a shrill and bloodthirsty tone, like an actual hunt underway, closing in for the kill.

The Earl wondered how the dogs had escaped the control of his manservants.

Astride the palomino, Devereaux seemed to await his approach to no good end, spat tobacco juice onto the ground in his path, reeled the skittish, high-string Palomino around, and contempt narrowed his eyes.

The Earl frowned and looked about himself in confusion. “You’ll show me some respect,” he called out to the wrangler, “when this place belongs to me.”

“You think you’re better than other people,” Devereaux said; his thick accent in itself set him apart from most other Americans Pennmarten had encountered. “Don’t you, Lordship?” The gruff tone had turned actively belligerent, and the title was added with a sneer of contempt. “Don’t you, with all your high-born ways and fancified airs?” The cowboy’s dark brown eyes flashed with a triumphant light.

In truth, Devereaux himself had almost forgotten his own unfortunate origins until this last summer: born in France, came to America as a boy, then roughly resentfully fostered by frontiersmen, horsemen, a humorless Catholic priest, compelled to perform the work of a man long before he reached puberty. Only from animals had he learned anything that resembled love. The prey animals such as horses, he identified with, he understood. At present this Earl struck him as a predator, a killer by choice. Devereaux’s deep suspicion towards all of humanity seemed frequently justified during the brief existence he viewed as uniquely cursed, yet hard work and excessive drinking had served well to help him forget almost everything—until the Earl arrived.

Devereaux admired the man’s dogs, though he felt they had been excessively trained for only a specialized blood sport.

Pennmarten himself had stirred resentments deeper in the wrangler’s breast than he could even begin to understand.

Startled by the scorn on the young wrangler’s face and in his tone, Pennmarten sidled closer, perplexed and prepared to protest. However, due to the intensity and urgency of the sound, which became an unearthly chorus of hysteria, both men upon uneasy mounts turned towards the earnest, immanent regaling of canine throats.

Voices of the dogs chorused, pealed, ripped a hole in quietude of the afternoon.

The Earl stiffened, upright in his stirrups, for he recognized the unmitigated frenzy for the kill; his heart stumbled, his bowels threatened to explode.

All at once, everything felt terribly wrong.

Devereaux’s face had gone ashen, wild-eyed. He appeared a frightened boy despite his downy whiskers. He hurled an expression of loathing at Pennmarten, for which the Earl felt too stunned to return anything but his own bewilderment.

The wrangler yelped, “You ain’t any better’n me, Your Lordship! You piss in the pot or on a tree, same as me!”

“Is there any comparison to be made?” The Earl heard himself respond, only too softly to be heard or noticed over the growing din.

The unholy yammer of the hounds reached a fever pitch as they burst from the trees; in a single rippling wave of animal strength they flung themselves as fast as they could bound, down the slope. The pack raged towards the two mounted men.

In terror, the palomino reared up on its back legs and tossed the wrangler from his saddle. He flipped off sideways, with a boot hooked in the stirrup, the horse bolted, then dragged the man facedown for perhaps a dozen yards before he fell free. Already the man lay badly bloodied, his face half scoured off. Rampant hounds chased the horse past the corral while others circled the fallen man, snapped and ripped at his motionless figure on the ground.

When the Earl’s mount reared, he remained in balance and stood higher in the stirrups, though his handsome face stretched and flushed with horror. He screamed commands at his dogs to desist, which they ignored, ripping into the Frenchman’s body and shaking their heads as if famished and feasting. The Earl fumbled behind himself, and managed to rip his rifle free of its leather sleeve across the back of his saddle.

Until this point, no one had noticed that Titania Jamison, the housekeeper for Elkhorn Lodge, stood near the firs and ponderosas on the low bluff that overlooked the corral at the west side. Head enclosed in a small, plain bonnet, her pale face appeared serene, hands clasped before the ruffled black dress and white apron as if in prayer. This imposing, confident woman whom everyone respected, whom some people feared, seemed unaffected, or at least untroubled, by the grisly scene that unfolded just below her.

Her most striking feature was the extremely beautiful pair of eyes on a round and otherwise rather plain face; those eyes, quite large for the face, remarkably alert and clear, however upon close encounter often struck an observer as somehow coldly observant. The sparkle of confidence concealed a variety of mistrust with roots invisibly deep.

She unfolded her hands and raised them.

A low humming that was not quite a song, more like the buzz arising from an agitated beehive came from deep within the throat of Titania Jamison.

She began to chant quietly, yet clearly and rapidly, almost under her breath, words that merged with the continued hum: “Sacrifices must be made, lest the balance be betrayed…” Within moments she finished the invocation.

The dogs that leaped and snarled at the horses, that growled and ripped jaws at the fallen Devereaux, abruptly fell silent, grew still.

The animals turned to face her as one.

Though the mare still shuddered and stamped her unease beneath him, Robert Pennmarten’s stricken eyes lifted in search of the cause of his hunting pack’s unnatural abatement of their attack, this seemingly unnatural quiescence that overcame them. He had raised his rifle in both hands and aimed it at the dogs, but could not shoot for fear of instead killing the wrangler. His weapon sank before him as he scanned about.

He saw Mrs. Jamison on the eastern rise with both hands lifted.

The animals had utterly desisted from their attack, whined low, and now trotted towards the woman, mutely, meekly drawn to her as if on invisible threads.

Pennmarten felt a chill of foreboding, as much as deep relief, at the woman’s evident ability to subdue and summon his hounds. While perhaps he should have felt purely glad that they had been controlled, her manner of doing it, hands raised and still audibly humming, terrified him in totally different ways than the actual attack.

Somehow the chastisement by Devereaux humiliated him deeply, in a manner he had never allowed an ordinary, common person to do to him.

He felt that his soul had almost been lost amid this horrifying spectacle.

Yet now, Mrs. Jamison commanded every particle of his attention, drew him like iron filings to a magnet in a manner he could not avoid, just as she drew the dogs to her.

Suddenly he did not know what to think of this woman.

He rapidly dismounted, with a few strides led the mare to a hitching-post, where he expertly twirled the reins around it with a swift, practiced gesture. Pennmarten seemed to feel an actual physical pressure of Mrs. Jamison’s regard, though he turned and ran to where Devereaux lay face-down in the dirt. He laid aside his weapon, knelt beside the fallen figure, whose front side he dreaded to see, though the vicious tears of clothing and flesh along the back and sides were bad enough to horrify any sensitive soul.

While his own heart hammered in distress, he managed to swiftly determine that the wrangler breathed indeed.

Then, irresistibly, Pennmarten’s attention shifted, just as a sheet pulls around a sail on the rigging of a ship, drawn over his shoulder, he felt tilted in her direction.

As the pack approached her, Mrs. Jamison began to move slowly, she walked without haste towards the root cellar where they slept at night, for protection from wild animals. The dogs surrounded her, followed her onto the low rise below the cabins, some distance north and east from the schoolhouse.

She bent, lifted the cellar door, the pack streamed past her into their shelter, then silently she closed the door upon them.

Pennmarten felt at that moment that he should be tending the mutilated Devereaux. Then he heard other voices and feet moving towards him, while his heart in his chest felt like a thorny tangle of dread inextricable without terrible, perhaps mortal damage.

Still in the silent thunder of his head he thought: The hounds no longer belong to me—if they ever truly did.

(CONTINUED…)