Product Description Lock Crick has returned home to his friends, after serving thirteen months of punishment and pain, for the accidental killing of a hitchhiker, on a dark country road, in the pouring rain.Now, games and masks and nightmares of six friends' shared past, conspire and collide, as childhood demons taunt and hide, on this Halloween night and the eve of winter's bane.A welcome home celebration and a trick or treat incantation, turns rotten and rank, during a party prank, when an uninvited guest ends up slain.Another accident? Murder maybe? Is it Owen Poe's blood or a fake blood stain? Because now his body is missing, and good friends are acting strange.Raven Cathmore and her grown-up orphan friends must learn the rules of insanity and the reality of someone's twisted game. As the snowfall grows steeper and the body-part pile gets deeper, someone is playing for keeps, and one of them is to blame. Review "It's Agatha Christie meets Abbot and Costello meets Stephen King meets something altogether different!" --- Emit Enihcam"There is a light at the end of this twisted dark maze, but once you reach that light, you just might want to turn around and run back into the maze. It is sometimes better to be left in the dark. And somethings are better left unknown." --- Lizzie Borden"It will raise every hair on the hairiest werewolf and give goosebumps to any ghost." --- Jack the Ripper"A murder wrapped in a mystery, buried in a snow storm, smothered in darkness and sprinkled with screams." --- The Ubiquitous Umbra"YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE ENDING!" --- D.B. Cooper From the Author When i was a child, I played with my imagination. Now that I am a man, my imagination plays with me. ---spider hacksaw From the Inside Flap The Omen Poem (Childhood Nursery Rhyme)I am you and you are me, and we are playing hide and seek.I look for you, you look for me, all ye all ye, all outs in free.Run and hide, hide and run, this is a promise of things to come.We play our games, we have our fun,Till we all join together,and I am one From the Back Cover Lock Crick is abandoned by his parents at the age of four. His mother, Marybell leaves him with her sister, Ladybug Pudge, and her sister's family, to be raised on their family's farm.   A year after his arrival, Lock's older cousin, Gideon Pudge, is diagnosed with brain cancer. Aunt Ladybug and Uncle Avon, choose to ignore medical treatment and instead pursue healing by God through the power of prayer, as prescribed by their church pastor.   Gideon Pudge dies a horribly agonizing death several months later, screaming from his bed in the attic, as Aunt Ladybug and Uncle Avon, pray night and day for a miracle. He is six years old.   Gideon is buried in the county Cemetery behind the farm. Lock turns five years old and he is now alone with his Aunt and Uncle.   Ladybug's grief enters its full bloom. She begins to imagine that Lock is Gideon's ghost, and that he is terribly lonely and if they do not find brothers and sisters for him, he will leave forever.   To ease his wife's suffering, Avon Pudge begins kidnapping children. Boys and girls that resemble Gideon and Lock are what she prefers. He travels long distances to find the perfect opportunities to snatch the perfect children. Then he brings each one back, as a sacrifice to Ladybug's insanity, in hopes that it will make her happy. Just as Ladybug hopes it will make Gideon's ghost happy.   Within a year Ladybug reaches her point of no return. She hangs herself in the attic bedroom where her only child died, screaming as she prayed to an absent God.   Uncle Avon buries his wife alongside his son in the county cemetery. That night he goes to bed and sleeps for several days. When he wakes up, the Uncle that Lock had known is dead. He has been replaced by a monster, wearing his Uncle's flesh. A monster named Avon Pudge.   The abuse of the orphan children intensifies from that day forward, as the monster tries to