This is not the official prologue, changes may be made before physical book is published.
What Lurks on Connable Road
The first thing you notice is the silence.
Not the peaceful kind — the kind that feels pulled tight, like a rope stretched between the trees. Even the wind seems to hold its breath along Connable Road. The branches don’t move unless something else moves them, and the grass grows in strange directions, as if leaning away from something unseen.
Most people drive this stretch without thinking. A quick left turn, a brief dip in the pavement, a flicker of trees in their headlights. Normal. Ordinary.
But for those who walk it — really walk it — the road feels different.
Like someone else is walking with them.
That night, Haley was the first to sense it. She paused at the edge of the tree line, her flashlight beam trembling over tangled brush and old fence posts swallowed by vines. She didn’t know why she stopped… only that something felt wrong. Deeply wrong. The kind of wrong that sets your nerves humming long before your mind understands the danger.
“Do you smell that?” she whispered.
Ryan joked at first, but the words died in his throat as the scent drifted closer — heavy, sweet, and rotten. A smell that didn’t belong to anything living. A smell that suggested something very old was moving, slowly, patiently, somewhere beyond the reach of the light.
Tyler raised his phone to check the geocache coordinates again. The signal flickered. Then vanished.
“What the hell?” he muttered, shaking it like that would help. “I just had service.”
But the woods were already shifting.
A branch cracked.
Another.
Then the sound of something dragging across the forest floor — not urgently, but with purpose, like it knew exactly where they stood.
Micah swallowed hard. “Stay on the road,” he said. “Seriously. We shouldn’t be here.”
Jess wasn’t listening. She was staring into the darkness, her breath unsteady, eyes wide — not with fear, but with recognition. As if a memory she never wanted to have was surfacing again.
“There’s something watching us,” she whispered.
No one disagreed.
The rot smell thickened, settling in the air around them like invisible fog. The woods fell still, too still, and every instinct screamed to turn back. To run. To forget whatever note they had found, whatever clue had led them here.
But it was already too late.
Something shifted between the trees.
Tall. Wrong.
A shape that leaned, as though trying to remember how a human body stood.
Haley’s voice broke the silence.
“Don’t look at it. Just keep walking.”
And for one heartbeat — one impossible moment — the creature obeyed the stillness with them, watching, learning, waiting for whichever one of them would be the first to look back.
Because on Connable Road, the danger isn’t in seeing what lurks in the dark.
It’s in letting it learn you.