SUFFER THE CHILDREN

One hundred years ago in Port Arbello a pretty little girl began to scream. And struggle. And die. No one heard. No one saw. Just one man whose guilty heart burst in pain as he dashed himself to death in the sea.

Italy, 1252: Inquisition. Accusation. Fear. Torture. The guilty and the innocent dying for sins real and imagined, in the flames of the burning stake...

Neilsville, 1978: Peter Balsam has come to this sleepy desert town to teach its youth, and finds a mystery of mounting horror. Something is happening to the young girls of St. Francis Xavier High School--something evil. In bloodlet and terror a suicide contagion has swept the town...while a dark order of its holy men enacts a secret medieval ritual.

Could such a lovely little town hold something so evil? Clark's Harbor was the perfect coastal haven, jealously guarded against outsiders. But now strangers have come to settle there. And a small boy is suddenly free of a frenzy that had gripped him since birth...

A child cried out...in torment. In terror. From out of the past, from out of the mists, a terrible vengeance is born.

Amanda: A century ago, a gentle blind girl walked the cliffs of Paradise Point. Then the children came--taunting, teasing--until she lost her footing and fell, shrieking her rage to the drowning sea...

The children were waiting. Waiting for centuries. Waiting for someone to hear their cries. Now nine-year-old Christie Lyons has come to live in the house on the hill--the house where no children have lived for fifty years.

Now little Christie will sleep in the old-fashioned nursery on the third floor.

Something is happening to the children of Eastbury, Massachusetts...Something that causes healthy babies to turn cold in their cribs. Something that strikes at the heart of every parent's darkest fears. Something unexplained that is taking the children, one by one.

Sally Montgomery has just lost her beautiful little baby girl. Lucy and Jim Corliss, bitterly divorced, have been reunited by the sudden disappearance of their son. An entire town waits on the edge of panic for the next child to be taken. They all know there must be a reason for the terror.

Prairie Bend. Brilliant summers amid golden fields. Killing winters of razorlike cold. A peaceful, neighborly village, darkened by legends of death.

Who is Nathaniel?

For a hundred years, the people of Prairie Bend have whispered the name in wonder and fear. Some say he is simply a folk tale--a legend created to frighten children on cold winter nights. Some swear he is a terrifying spirit returned to avenge the past. And soon...very soon...some will come to believe that Nathaniel lives still--darkly, horrifyingly real.

Nathaniel.

La Paloma...once home to a proud Spanish heritage...now a thriving modern community high in the California hills, where a boy named Alex is about to become the instrument of a terrible, undying vengeance...

Alex needs a miracle.

Alex Lonsdale was one of the most popular kids in La Paloma. Until the horrifying car accident. Until a brilliant doctor's medical miracle brought him back from the brink of death. Now Alex has come back. He seems the same. But in his eyes there is a terrible blankness. In his heart there is a coldness. And if his parents, his friend, his girlfriend could see inside his brain, if they could see his dreams, they would be terrified.

Now the people must die.

Pity the dead.

For one hundred years the old mill has stood silent, its dread secrets locked away and barred from view. Still, the people of Westover, Massachusetts, remember--remember and whisper of that fateful day when horrifying flames claimed eleven innocent lives. The day the mill's iron doors slammed shut--forever.

Pray for the living.

Now, Westover is a sleepy town tucked away beyond the Interstate, all but forgotten. Now, the last of the once-powerful Sturgess family dreams of reopening the mill. Now Philip Sturgess is about to unlock the doors to the past...and unleash an elemental fury. For beyond those doors, padlocked for so many years, deep within the dark, abandoned building, a terrible vengeance waits.

Cassie Winslow is sixteen. Cassie has just lost her mother in a terrible accident. Now Cassie, lonely and frightened, has come across the country to live with the father she barely knows and his new family in tiny False Harbor on Cape Cod.

For Cassie, the strange, unsettling dreams that come to her suddenly in the dead of night are merely the beginning. For very soon, Cassie Winslow will come to know the terrifying powers that are her gift.

The House: Lush and deceptively tranquil, with its pristine beaches and blossoming vegetation, the island basks in splendid isolation off the South Carolina coast. Here, where sudden storms unleash the murderous rage of wind and sea, stands the Devereaux mansion, a once-great plantation house now crumbling amid ancient oaks dripping with Spanish moss. Here, Marguerite Devereaux, fifty and childless, has cast off her dreams to care for her aged, demanding mother.

The Family: Now, for the first time in twenty years, Kevin Devereaux has returned home to this secluded place with his wife and two children. They have come to visit Kevin's mother--hated, frightening Mother, with her slash of red lipstick, mask of bone-white powder, and a tongue that has always cut to Kevin's heart...and into his darkest nightmares. She said she was ill--but is that the real reason the old woman summoned the son she has not seen in so many years?

To the Tanner family, Silverdale beckons as a marvelous opportunity. For here, in this serene town nestled high in the majestic Rockies, a job promotion awaits Blake; new friends and activities beckon Sharon. And in the windswept mountain air, their shy, nature-loving son, Mark, will have the ideal opportunity to overcome the physical frailty an illness has caused.

Silverdale is the perfect town. Even Silverdale High School seems perfect--a model school where well-behaved students make their parents and teachers proud. And the football team never--ever--loses.

But soon, too soon, Sharon Tanner will come to doubt the sanctuary of her family's perfect new surroundings. Too soon she will begin to suspect the things she cannot yet know: The secret rituals to which Silverdale's innocent children are unwittingly subjected... The hidden places in deep cellars where steel gleams coldly against the dark--the steel of cages built to contain an unimaginable evil... And the sudden violence that turns a loving child murderous.

Soon--perhaps too late--Sharon Tanner will realize that beneath Silverdale's perfect facade a terrible presence watches...and waits. Through sleepless, fear-racked nights she will listen to an eerie cry of unfathomable rage and pain. A wail so horrifyingly unearthly it could belong to no living thing, animal or human, she has ever known.

Secret Cove. Ruggedly beautiful and remote, bordered by dark woods and deserted beaches, this postcard-perfect village harbors the mansions of the wealthy--families who have summered in splendid seclusion at Secret Cove for generations. Here, one hundred years ago, on the night of the annual August Moon Ball, a shy and lovely servant girl committed a single, unspeakable act of violence--an act so shocking its legacy lives still.

And now, long after the horror of that night has faded to a tale whispered by children around summer camp fires, an unholy terror is about to be reborn. Now, one family is about to feel the icy hand of supernatural fear--as Melissa Holloway, shy and troubled and just thirteen years old, comes to know the blood-drenched secret that waits behind a locked attic door... For as Secret Cove sleeps unaware, a soul-chilling presence slowly begins to enact a terrifying vengeance.

Borrego, New Mexico. A peaceful little desert town. Except for one thing. Somebody here hates teenagers.

Hates them. These troublemakers, these rebels, have to be controlled.

Silenced. Forever.

The Andersons left the town at the edge of the swamp long ago, never meaning to return. There was something not quite right about the vast cruel lowlands of Villejeune...something murky, menacing, hostile...an influence too malevolent to be natural.

But the Andersons' dream of a new life in Atlanta faded away with Ted's lost job and sixteen-year-old Kelly's emotional problems. Now, hoping a change of scenery might help their troubled daughter put her life back together, Ted and Mary Anderson have decided to come home. Home to Villejeune.

But something waits for them. Something evil.

They call it The Academy.

Housed in a secluded, cliff-top mansion overlooking the rugged and picturesque Pacific coast, it is a school for special children. Children gifted--or cursed--with extraordinary minds. Children soon to come under the influence of an intelligence even more brilliant than their own--and unspeakably evil. For within this mind a dark, ingenious plan is taking form. A hellish experiment meant to probe the ultimate limits of the human brain.

Computer whiz kid Adam Aldrich lives for his exploration of virtual reality. Lured ever deeper into his video fantasy world, he does not imagine that his reality will soon become a living nightmare. Until the moment he sees the blinding light. Adam's fate will be called a tragic midnight accident. But is it something far worse?

Amy Carlson, serious and shy, is fascinated by human behavior. But when she volunteers for an experiment in choice making, she unknowingly narrows her own options. When Amy's fate is sealed, will it be suicide--or murder?

A telephone ringing in the dead of night signals the beginning of a journey into fear as Mary Anne Carpenter, newly separated and struggling to raise her two children alone, hears the shocking news: two thousand miles away, her friends, the Wilkensons, are suddenly, inexplicably dead--their only child, Mary Anne's godchild, abruptly orphaned. Even as Mary Anne rushes to embrace her young charge the disturbing questions mount. Was it merely a chance--though tragic--mishap that took these lives? Or was it murder?

Soon Mary Anne will begin to suspect an even more sinister force at work. For Joey Wilkenson, a sad and silent adolescent, seems to harbor secrets beyond her most nightmarish imaginings. As early winter closes in on the majestic, lonely spot where the Wilkensons have built their beautiful ranch, transforming the mountain landscape into a forbidding place of blinding storms and dangerous darkness, Joey's sly secretiveness, his volatile temper, begin to turn Mary Anne's tender feelings to icy fear.

It will be the sweetest kind of homecoming for Karen Spellman. After years of living in Los Angeles, the pretty young widow and her two daughters are leaving urban chaos behind to return to the lush countryside of Karen's childhood: Pleasant Valley, a verdant, fertile place where Karen will rediscover not only the bounty of the land, but love. For Karen is going home to marry her high school sweetheart.

But something sinister awaits the Spellmans. Something as primal as nature itself. Something so hideous it seems not earthly, but spawned in hell. For here, long ago, amid placid rolling fields, a shadowy menace once stalked the innocent. Dormant, it waits for summer's heat to shimmer over the valley in a suffocating wave, waits for the arrival of its perfect victim.

For five years Seattle was seized in the terrifying grip of a monster as black as evil itself. A sadistic serial killer methodically lured his victims to grisly deaths in order to satisfy a twisted passion for life, leaving a trail of mutilated bodies across the nation.

For five years journalist Anne Jeffers stuck to this gruesome story like a shadow through the killer's capture, trial, and appeal, doggedly keeping the wheels of justice churning toward the electric chair, despite the prisoner's reasoned claims of innocence.

Then came the day of execution. The police and the public, especially Anne, thought the five-year nightmare was over. But it was just beginning...

It is an offer anthropologist Katharine Sundquist cannot refuse. A chance to study the unusual skeletal remains unearthed on the volcanic flanks of Haleakala, Maui. Yet for Katharine's sixteen-year-old son, Michael, the sudden move is jarring. It's the last thing he needs while struggling with the still painful death of his father.

And here, beyond the sparkling beaches, masked by the deceptive beauty of the rainforest, a terrible danger waits. As white-hot magma spews from the volcano on the Big Island, sending a life-choking fog over Maui, while below the black depths of the Pacific a substance far more deadly than lava snakes through undiscovered fissures in the ocean floor, nature itself seems to portend the terror to come.

It begins with a video transmission so shocking that Katharine cannot believe what flashes on her computer screen--then instantly, inexplicably, vanishes. Secret deliveries in the dead of night to a restricted wing of the high-tech laboratory in which she works signal that behind locked doors some sinister experiment is unfolding.

And then, with the sudden, unexplained death of Michael's friend, a disturbing truth dawns: the corporation that is funding Katharine's dig has a far greater investment than she has imagined--an investment in medical terror. And her son may be part of their hideous grand plan.

Michael's chances of survival: next to none.