Below is an excerpt from Preston Allen’s new book, I Disappeared Them, published by Akashic Press.
Preston will be one of over 500 authors reading and speaking at the 41st annual Miami Book Fair from November 17-24. Preston’s reading will be at 4:30 pm on Saturday, November 23 in Room 8301. For more info visit MiamiBookFair.com.
—There are two photos of the hunter in the ninth grade.
In the first one, he stands alone—a monstrosity with a long, pale face, freckles, and a crooked smile. His eyes are black as a starless midnight. His long-fingered hands clutch a science textbook as gray and tattered as the noble garments that hang from his anorexic frame. If photographs possessed smell and taste, his would smell of ashes and taste of dust. He’s hunched over. He’s a walking skeleton with a twisted spine.
He’s a five-hundred-year-old teenager fresh from the grave.
He’s Nosferatu.
—He’s Count Dracula.
In the second photo, his outfit is varying shades of gray, from his name-brand sneakers to his stylish overcoat and anachronistic ascot. His outfit is composed of expensive and often clashing elements indicative of his family’s nobility and his own vanity.
In this group shot, he stands apart from the rest. His eyes are vacant, his skin pale, for he is dead. He is a corpse who struts with flair.
In the photograph, he stares out at you. He’s arrogant, and he loathes you.
You are mere mortal. He is the ancient evil.
—The other students say he is a fright in these Science Club photographs, and he would agree. In the photographs, you are seeing the hunter as the hunter once saw himself. Behold the killer inchoate. Behold the monster in his infancy. A photograph is a future memory.
