Chain of Souls (Salem VI) by Jack Heath, John Thompson

between two hilly pastures. A stone wall ran along the path on both sides of the road, and beyond the walls sheep grazed the hillside. He was alone, and even though he had the feeling he'd been to this place before, he didn't recognize it at first.
    Ahead of him the road curved sharply and ran beneath the branches of a huge and ancient tree. The shade beneath the tree seemed unnaturally dark, and when he focused on it he remembered the girl he had seen walking down this same road. He had been afraid for the girl because she had been walking toward a place where he had sensed the presence of great evil. Now, even though he sensed all those things again, when he tried to stop walking he found he couldn't. His feet just kept moving as if someone else was controlling them and forcing him to take step after step.
    Up ahead the darkness got closer and closer, almost as if it was moving rather than him, and then a second later he was inside it and following the road around a sharp bend to where he could see a house in the distance. The feeling of incipient danger grew even stronger. The house was old and austere but nothing unusual, just a clapboard structure similar to many in New England, with a steep pitched roof and a number of chimneys and gabled windows along the top.
    In spite of its rather normal appearance, something about the house made him want to stay faraway. His feelings of dread were growing stronger by the second, but they weren't powerful enough to overcome whatever force was drawing him onward. He came to the outside of the house and finally managed to bring himself to a halt. There was no one else in sight, but he was certain the house was not empty. A feeling of great evil radiated from its walls like heat pulsing from an oven.
    He looked at the downstairs windows, but at first he could see nothing because the light reflected off the glass and made them opaque. After another second he caught a flicker of motion in one of the upstairs windows, and when he tilted his head upward he recognized Sarah. She was standing very straight, her hands behind her back as if they might have been bound. Sarah was looking down at him, but her lips weren't moving. She was not trying to call out to him, rather she was staring at him, and her eyes seemed cold and distant as if she was rendering some harsh judgment against him.
    Upon seeing her, John ran to the front door and tried to open it, but it was locked. He kicked it and then slammed his shoulder into the wood, but it was thick and well built and would not budge. He went around to the windows and tried to raise them, and when that didn't work he tried to break one by throwing a rock through it but the rock just bounced off the glass. It seemed as if some sort of force field protected the entire house.
    It didn't hurt him physically to touch the force field, but each time he came into contact with it he saw terrible, familiar images that stung him as if they were electric shocks. His mind conjured pictures of dead bodies, horribly mangled and disfigured, and walls smeared with blood. He smelled the overpowering copper stench from vast quantities of spilled blood and also the reek of feces from disemboweled and ruptured intestines.
    Almost brought to his knees by the images, he jerked away from the wall, but even as he did, he realized the pictures in his head weren't of the underground room where the Salem Coven had performed their horrible blood sacrifices. The room looked very similar, but was different somehow. He suddenly felt a terrible chill as he realized that the pictures were telling him that Salem wasn't the only place, that there were other killing rooms equally as horrible as the tile-walled room beneath Salem.
    He backed away farther and looked up at the window again, but now Sarah was gone. In her place he saw the young girl he had seen walking the dirt road during his dream several nights earlier. She was looking down at him, her skin the pallor of death, her