It’s autumn in the town of Harrow, but something besides the season is changing there…
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Chuck Wendig’s newest horror novel Black River Orchard, in which a small town is transformed when seven strange trees begin bearing magical apples—out from Del Rey on September 26.
It’s autumn in the town of Harrow, but something besides the season is changing there.
Because in that town there is an orchard, and in that orchard, seven most unusual trees. And from those trees grows a new sort of apple: strange, beautiful, with skin so red it’s nearly black.
Take a bite of one of these apples, and you will desire only to devour another. And another. You will become stronger. More vital. More yourself, you will believe. But then your appetite for the apples and their peculiar gifts will keep growing—and become darker.
This is what happens when the townsfolk discover the secret of the orchard. Soon it seems that everyone is consumed by an obsession with the magic of the apples… and what’s the harm, if it is making them all happier, more confident, more powerful?
Even if something else is buried in the orchard besides the seeds of these extraordinary trees: a bloody history whose roots reach back to the very origins of the town.
But now the leaves are falling. The days grow darker. It’s harvest time, and the town will soon reap what it has sown.
PROLOGUE THE FIRST
The Orchard-Keeper’s Tale
Calla Paxson, age twelve, lurched upright in her bed, her heart pounding as if the nightmare she’d been having was still chasing her. She tried to chase the nightmare down in turn—but the ill dream fled from her, leaving only the raw, skinless feeling of its passing.
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As the dream darted into darkness, a new certainty arose:
Someone is in the house.
It was just a feeling—an intrusion, as if the air had been disrupted, stirred about. It’s just the bad dream, she thought. Dreams seemed to stay with you, the way the smell of her friend Esther’s cigarettes hung in their hair, their clothes. (Technically, they were Esther’s mother’s cigarettes. Esther was thirteen and assured Calla, “I’m a teenager, and teenagers are allowed to smoke,” adding hastily, “but don’t tell my mom, because she’ll fucking assassinate me.”)
Calla rubbed her eyes, looked at the digital clock next to her bed: 3:13 a.m.
Her heart was pounding now and she failed to calm it. She grumbled and flopped back onto the pillow, knowing now that falling back asleep would be hard.
But then, downstairs—
A faint whump.
She sat up again. Heart spurred to a new beat.
No longer just a feeling, now it was a reality:
Someone was in the house.
They didn’t have a dog.
Her father would be asleep.
So, what was that noise, then?
The fridge icemaker made a racket sometimes. Or the heater. The pipes in the radiators knocked and banged—it was March, after all, the days warming, the nights still cold. Still. She knew the icemaker, the heater, the sounds of the old farmhouse settling.
This wasn’t that.
Get Dad.
Barefoot, in loose flannel pants and a pink Alessia Cara Band-Aid shirt, Calla darted to the door of her bedroom and eased it open a crack. Another bump-and-thump from downstairs. A door closing? Her throat tightened with fear.
She hurried down the hall to her father’s bedroom—she opened the door to his room quick, the old hinges complaining (shut up shut up shut up), and ran to the bed and shook her father—
“Dad,” she hissed. “Dad!”
But her hand collapsed to the bed. He wasn’t there. Just his wadded-up comforter tangled around a pillow.
Another sound downstairs. This time, she was sure it was the front door opening and closing. Calla hurried down the hallway on the balls of her feet, looking down the staircase—
And there stood her father, the front door closed behind him. Cold air rushed the steps, raising gooseflesh on the girl’s bare arms. He was wearing his barn jacket; he’d been outside. His hair was a tousle. Sweat slicked his brow despite the cold. In his long arms, he held a bundle, swaddled in an old set of bedsheets. Something dark and crooked poked out the one end. Calla released her breath in an exasperated sigh.
“Dad,” she said, irritated. “You scared the crap out of me.”
He startled a little upon seeing her. His arms full, he leaned his head toward his body, using his shoulder to push his eyeglasses farther up the bridge of his bookish nose. “Calla, hey. Gosh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you. You can go back to bed, sweetie, everything’s fine.”
But Calla was nothing if not curious (read: nosy). Her feet carried her down the steps, buoyed by a child’s salacious desire to poke into her parent’s private business.
“What are you doing?” she asked, eyebrows up, mouth down.
Her father—Dan—looked left and right, the furtive glance of someone who was afraid he was about to get caught, but then grinned a big goofball grin. “What am I doing? Securing our future, Calla Lily. That’s what I’m doing.” He licked the corners of his mouth and hurried past her, toward the kitchen. He put the bundle on their secondhand country nook table, a table already piled with stuff like bills (past-due), a rusted toolbox, some kitchen implements, a can of dirt (if only Calla could one day find a boyfriend who loved her as much as Dad loved dirt). Every flat surface in their house became a shelf, he always said with some exasperation, as if it wasn’t him that was making it that way.
“Our future,” Calla said, bleary. She looked at the bedsheets. “It’s just a bundle of sticks.” And it was. Sticks like the fireblack fingers of a charred skeleton.
“Not sticks,” he said. “Branches. From a tree.” He sniffed, still half panting with excitement. “You know what, I need a drink. A celebration drink. Preemptive,” he muttered mostly to himself, “but I think deserved.”
From the cabinet he pulled a bottle of something brown. Whiskey. (Calla admitted to having tried a sip about six months ago. It tasted like someone poured campfire ash down her throat. Why did adults drink that stuff? Did they hate themselves? She assumed that they did and she promised herself she’d never hate herself, not now, not ever.) As he uncorked the bottle and splashed it into a coffee mug, Calla sidled over toward the bundle of sticks. She peeled back the sheets, revealing dozens of black sticks bound together with strips of yellow cloth. (The cloth dotted with, what, red mud?)
Dad watched her from the other side of the counter. “It’s scionwood. For grafting.” As if she understood what that meant. These were just sticks. Why collect sticks? Sticks were, like, nature’s garbage. It was one of her chores here at the new (old) house: to go around the yard, picking up sticks. Then Dad burned them. (And, she assumed, made that nasty whiskey from the remnants, ugh.)
“Okayyyyy,” she said, because, whatever. Dad had gone out at three in the morning to get… sticks? Was he having a break with reality? A stroke? She peeled back the other side of the bedsheet, and something tumbled out—a little something, soft and bloodless pink, and it bounced off her foot and—
She cried out.
It was a finger.
A severed human finger.
She backpedaled away, still feeling the way it felt—moist, cold, mushy but also somehow stiff—on the top of her bare foot—
Dad was already scooping it up, laughing nervously.
“Your finger,” she said, alarmed, looking at his hand. But he had all his fingers. Which meant—
That finger belonged to someone else.
“What about my fingers, sweetie?” he asked.
“You—you’re not missing—that was a finger—” Her gaze crawled around his hands, looking for the finger he’d snatched off the ground.
But instead, he turned his hand toward her and opened it up.
She winced, not wanting to see.
“Calla, look. It’s not—it’s not a finger.” He laughed, almost dismissively. Like, What a stupid little kid. “You must be tired.”
Peeking through squinted lids, she saw that he was right. It wasn’t a finger at all. It was a thin apple core from an eaten apple. Black seeds exposed like fat carpenter ants. Skin so red it was almost black.
“That’s—that’s an apple.”
“Sure is,” he said, fire dancing in his eyes. “That’s the point of all of this.”
“Uh, okay. I still don’t get it, Dad.” She still felt like she was reeling. She was sure she’d seen a finger. But maybe her mind was just playing tricks on her. That bad dream again, poisoning her thoughts like a dead animal in a well.
“I’m saying this scionwood, it’s going to help us make an orchard. Like your grandfather wanted to do so long ago. But couldn’t. It all starts here. The future is this.” He held up the apple core, turning it around in his fingers. “Everything starts with this apple.”
PROLOGUE THE SECOND
The Golden Man’s Tale
1901, The Goldenrod Estate, BucksCounty, Pennsylvania.
Henry Hart Golden—anthropologist, archaeologist, student of law, craftsman, collector, chef, explorer, and folklorist—stood in front of a wall of his own tilework design. These red clay tiles were glazed with wild colors, each emblazoned with unique and strange iconography, and it was in this place he stood, arms spread wide, in front of those who had gathered there in their handcrafted masks, to speak of the country they called home:
“Friends of the Goldenrod Society, you know that I have been all around the world. I have explored the cenotes of the Yucatán. I’ve found the cloth-swaddled dead in mountain caves. I’ve been to Egypt and Nepal, I’ve dug earth with Chinamen—and had some of those same Chinamen try to bury me with what we found there.” At that, they laughed. “But it is here at home where I find my interest sharpened. And it is to our great nation that I turn my attention to ask: What is it that makes us so special? Now, my friends, I know what you’re thinking: Henry, the story of America is the story of its people—or, Henry, the story of America is in what we make and what we made, what we produce, what we craft and construct and conjure. Or, some would say, no, no, America is about the work. America is in the toil. It is in the very act of building rather than in what we build or who builds it. But I am here to tell you, no, the story of America is in our tools.”
Henry whipped off the cloth to reveal tools—not modern tools, no, but not ancient tools, either. Tools from fifty years past, a hundred, at most two centuries. Each numbered like an archaeological artifact. Whale oil lamps, astragal planes, flax hatchels, tin funnels, and the like. And in the center: a wrought-iron apple peeler with a wood base.
Those gathered gasped behind their masks—masks that were themselves amalgams of ceramic, cork, tin, and leather. He enjoyed their stupefaction, though to be fair they always gasped when Golden acted with flourish. They would eat dung out of his cupped hands if he asked them to—and grin as they did it.
With their attention fully seized, he continued:
“The tool is an expression of the maker—the choice of tool is the hallmark of a civilization. And the tools of America are humble, simple things. They are not the electric motor, the soot-belching machine. They are these tools you see before you: tools of iron and wood and tin. It is the hand, yes, but also the tool the hand holds, that shows who we are. Individually, oh, we are represented by our craft, by our art, by the meals we cook and the clothes we make. But as a society? As a nation? Our soul is expressed in the choice of our tools. And our tools must continue to be plain and unpretentious—but beautiful, too. Resilient and resistant to obsolescence. And they must do as we command.”
They, of course, applauded. He went on a bit longer after that, showing off some of the tools and their craftsmanship—but soon, his desires rose up in him like a dragon (as they always did) and that dragon would not be denied its gold (as it never was). He wound down his speech and went out among them, his people. They wanted to touch him—a passing brush of their knuckles upon his cheek, a hand softly pressing into the small of his back, a quick breath in his ear. He had collected these people as easily as he had collected the tools on the table behind him. They were his society in the truest sense of the word: They, in their masks, surrendered so much of their time to him. And in return, they joined together, made themselves better, made themselves richer.
It was of course someone else he had his eye on, someone he spied in the crowd during his speech: a new girl, likely one brought here by a society friend. She did not belong, though perhaps her family did, for she was likely the scion of some powerful local bloodline. (many of those present were.)
Her mask was a humble one, hastily made: a papier-mâché rabbit face, its ears bent forward, likely an error in the making but one that gave the prey’s countenance a sense of active, alarmed listening.
Henry could feel his desire tighten within him like a hangman’s rope, so he went right to her and asked the young woman if she’d like to see his private collection. She blushed and giggled and said yes, yes, of course, yes. A thousand times yes. Maybe too eager, but that was good.
Eager was ideal.
The two of them went to his chamber in the Goldenrod—high upstairs in the tower, though to him the chamber also felt subterranean. No windows to see in. Tile floors of his own design with grooves between them, gently sloping to the center. A dumbwaiter, too, that went all the way down to the kitchens below. His house had no staff. Henry would cook a meal with tools he brought with him from long ago, and then he’d draw it up the dumbwaiter to his room.
Now, though, the dumbwaiter was open and on the pewter tray within waited a single apple.
It was the perfect specimen. Red-black, gleaming, beautiful. Ready to be skinned and eaten. The seeds bitten and spit. The young woman, whatever her name was, went to it first, captivated by it, as was expected. It was rather hypnotizing. She reached for it but did not touch it, likely unsure she even should be touching it. He felt the frisson of excitement and fear climb through her; he could almost hear her wondering if she was simply too crass a creature, too foul a thing, to touch that apple. As if her own grotesque fingers, covered as they were in the filth of the world, might bring swift and inescapable rot to that perfect void of appleskin.
Appleskin, he thought. Yes. It was time. He eased toward her at an angle, passing by an old marble-top bureau with a small garden of plants upon it—he kept this room hot, good for the violets, the slipper orchids, the mother-in-law tongue—and as he ran his hands along their leaves, his fingers danced onto something just past the pots: a mask of his own making. He pulled it taut over his head and face. He smelled the esters of rose and elderflower. The tart tang of the fruit. His breath hissed through the mouth slit.
Henry pressed himself up against the young woman from behind, urgent and needy, smelling her hair, though through the appleskin mask, all he could truly detect was the scent of the fruit itself. Which suited him fine.
He whispered in her ear, “Do you like what you see?”
And she gasped, because here she was, trapped between two beautiful things. Caught between the Scylla of Golden, the Charybdis of the apple, his whisper still crawling around in her ear. And when she nodded, still transfixed by the fruit, he reached for something nearby, sitting on the corner of a wooden ice chest: an orchard pruning hook. Good for getting apples off their branches. Among other things.
Excerpted from Black River Orchard, copyright © 2023 by Chuck Wendig.
