This file contained detailed records. Stephanie had once read it as bedtime reading, because Salomon himself had compiled it. Salomon had infiltrated a gathering—this family had once belonged to a deacon of the town's Methodist Church. Fifty years later, the central figures at the family gathering were the aging children of several Methodist deacons. One of them had a fate intertwined with that pastor's and had once been his patient. The stories Salomon recorded had all come from that man, and the file was written in his first-person perspective, detailing the "premonitions" he saw whenever his aftereffects flared up.
Under alcohol and hypnotic spells, the man told him everything. Salomon had not been part of that mission, but he had handled the subsequent investigation. He had been only sixteen at the time, yet he had personally completed the record of that ill-fated destiny. The spellbook that had driven the former Methodist pastor insane was eventually found as well, though that was many years later and came at a staggering cost. It had also involved a whole host of Vampires and worm-men, even a giant monster.
That book was called The Secret of the Worms.
At the end of the file was an account of the final experiment conducted by the former Methodist pastor, Dan Jacobs: resurrecting a woman who had suffered brain death from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a prion disease. The records showed that Dan Jacobs had succeeded. He had drawn down lightning and revived the poor woman, who had been brain-dead for fifteen minutes. But it was not the patient named Mary Faye who returned to life. It was an unborn thing from Behind the Curtain—it lifted the curtain and burrowed into the real world through the dead woman's body, showing Dan Jacobs his deceased wife and son. One of