Wither [Paperback]

The college town of Windale, Massachusetts is proud of its colonial heritage -- including the legend of a dark witches' coven dating back three hundred years.No one in Windale actually believes in witches, or imagines that the blood-chilling history of the Salem era could repeat itself. But three people, unknown to one another, are experiencing vivid nightmares of palpable horror. They alone can sense that a dreadful presence is working its way into their waking lives -- and is coming forthem.

On a crisp autumn night deep in the New England woods, a young woman's harmless channeling ritual unwittingly opens the floodgates to terrifying forces that have, until then, lived only in dreams: a breed of demonic creatures with the power to shatter an unsuspecting town.J.G. Passarella is a screenwriter and novelist. He was born and raised outside Philadelphia, where he currently resides with his wife and two young children.Chapter 1

The house was growing. Eight-year-old Abby MacNeil heard it at night -- the low groan of the walls, the floorboards creaking, the radiator pipes letting out long and shuddering sighs. Abby would lie still in the dark and listen as the old house complained about its aching wooden bones. It was their first house -- she and her father had lived in apartments ever since her mother left, and before that, a trailer -- and so she accepted its growing pains as something old houses did in the night.

When they'd first moved to this house a month ago, in the dead of summer, her father had argued that this third-floor room would be too hot for a bedroom. And, in fact, it was stifling up here, where the heat seemed to thicken the airless shadow beneath the slanted ceilings. But Abby still loved it. The room was round like a fairy-tale tower, with a pointed cap roof of green shingles. From its high windows Abby could see the backyard and the weedy fields beyond, and farther still, the woods, cool and green and invitinl^