Follow The Leader

By J. J. Maguire

Trust The Few. Fear The Many. FOLLOW THE LEADER.

 

Lilith's idyllic life in the countryside is shattered when a group of masked men invades her home on a bone-chilling winter night.

 

When her daughter is snatched away before her very eyes, Lilith is left with no choice but to embark on a journey into the frozen wilderness to save her precious child.

 

As Lilith navigates the treacherous landscape, she realizes that the men who abducted her daughter are no ordinary kidnappers, and she must use all her wits and strength to evade them and rescue her child before it's too late.

 

The journey is fraught with peril, and Lilith must overcome her deepest fears if she is to succeed, and she realizes that there is more at stake than just her daughter's life.

 

Follow the Leader is a spine-tingling horror novella that will keep you on the edge of your seat.

 

Lilith's journey into the frozen wilderness is a journey into the unknown, a journey that will test her limits and force her to confront the darkest aspects of humanity.

 

Will she be able to save her daughter and stop the cult, or will she succumb to the same darkness that threatens to consume them all?

 

With its dark and atmospheric setting, heart-stopping horror, and unexpected twists and turns, FOLLOW THE LEADER is a story that will haunt you long after you turn the final page.

• Language: English
• Publisher: J. J. Maguire
• Release date: Feb 29, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224693979

J. J. Maguire

J. J. Maguire is an author and filmmaker from the North West of England, where he lives with his stunning and long-suffering fiancee, and their two amazing children. Oh, and two sinister cats.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

The woman hated coming home in rush hour. They always crammed the bus with people and smells that she struggled to identify, and not a single person would give up their seat for the elderly, the disabled, or her. Her bag full of clothes and new outfits banged against her sore legs, the plastic hangers poking and prodding every time someone pushed past her or the bus wobbled.

She stood on feet that had swelled to what felt like twice the size, holding on to a bar that rattled every time the bus stopped or slowed down.

Surrounded by coughing and sneezing and snoring.

The rain had been falling for a few days, and the nights were dark.

She just wanted to get home. Everything ached.

The bus reached Marina Drive, and she hit the bell.

Getting off was just as much of a chore. Her red hot feet and ballooning hands making carrying her belly off the bus through the tiny gaps people around her left a real hassle.

But she got there.

The bus was already around the corner by the time the woman had stopped to balance herself and pull out her umbrella.

This was another tricky section of the way home from work. The area had gone downhill since she was a kid, and you never felt more vulnerable than when it looked like there was nobody around. The street was full of shadows and alleyways, places no streetlight wanted to touch.

But this was just another day.

She just had to make the ten or fifteen-minute shuffle to her front door.

The umbrella opened before her, and she lifted it over her head to find she wasn’t alone. There was a person who stood in the rain before her, with their hood up and their face shrouded in darkness. They were close to her.

The woman’s first instinct was to run, but her body would not allow her to do that.

She planned on just walking around them, shouting for help, or ringing the police. But before she could move, before she could cry for help, before she could even get her phone out, the knife was five inches inside her stomach, and blood was oozing out around it.

The woman didn’t feel the puncture or hear the wet punch or feel any pain.

But she could hear the dripping of blood as it hit the wet concrete below and mixed with the rain. She heard the hooded person’s footsteps as they sprinted away.

Within a few seconds, she had hit the ground and couldn’t speak or open her eyes for the rain hammering down on her.

Her legs had given way, and her hands just wanted to stop the bleeding.

But she couldn’t get the knife out. And the bag full of all the cute little outfits she’d bought for the human growing inside her had spilt all over the road. All getting wet and dirty and forever soiled.

There she lay, at the side of the bus stop, in a deserted street that nobody good ever hung around in for too long. Bleeding out.

She pulled and screamed and coughed and moaned. But it was no use. She couldn’t get the knife out of her big, pregnant belly.

CHAPTER ONE

Iwas always weary on my way home from work in the winter.

The roads home through Nolan Hollow were narrow and winding and dangerous enough in the day, but at night, with the sporadic streetlights and void of the dark countryside surrounding it?

Yeah, that was something else.

Add snow and ice into the mix and you’ve got one nervous Lilith. You’d think I’d be used to it by now. We’d called Nolan Hollow our countryside dream home for four years now, and sure, I knew the roads like the back of my hand. But I drove in silence, trying to stay three miles below the speed limit with full beams because most of the patients who died in the Nolan Hollow Hospital were in car accidents on these very roads.

Some said the roads were cursed.

The worst patient that I’d seen was a woman named Bertha. She was old and sour-faced, but when the paramedics rushed her in after being hit by a speeding driver on a narrow bend while out for a walk, all she looked was afraid, her skin clammy, eyes glazed, brows furrowed.

Not in pain. No, she was far past the point of pain. She had two fractured legs, and her ribs had snapped and punctured her lungs. Both of them.

As I tried to help Doctor Silva save her life, she was drowning in her blood.

There were internal bleeds all up her abdomen. Sometimes, you know someone is dead on arrival as soon as you make eye contact with them. They don’t look at you. They look through you. At their loved ones, the ones already passed, waiting for them to pass too.

Bertha looked at me, or through me, just like that. After going for a walk that she’d done every day for fifty years, the roads of Nolan Hollow decided she would not do it ever again. And she died, about twenty minutes after she got to the hospital.

As I got closer to home, I let myself gaze out into the black abyss to my right. Through the gentle snowfall, I could just make out the dense forest, which was a sign that I was about three minutes from home.

I’d never explored the forest of Nolan Hollow. Nobody spoke about it. I didn’t even know how far it went. There were no scary stories, no beautiful landmarks. It was just there, and everybody ignored it. Sometimes I wondered why. Most of the time, I didn’t. I just knew that once the fields of cows and sheep became trees and shadows, and the road got steeper, I was almost home.

But besides the dark, narrow, icy roads, there was another reason to take it easy and play it safe that night.

It was Princess Samantha’s birthday the day after, and I had her present: an old-fashioned, wooden dollhouse she’d spotted in a store window months before, in the back.

It weighed enough to not be fragile, but my Princess Sam deserved a spotless, perfect dollhouse for her tenth birthday. She’d always loved to play-act with her dolls, with such a vivid imagination. She was like a god, pulling the strings from above, and having fun with her minions. And with this dollhouse, she’d be able to do it all the more.

I heard it slide along the backseat and hit the door as I turned a sharp bend and reached back, slotting the large box into the footwell to steady it.

Only took my eyes off the road for a second.

A split second.

When I looked back at the road, my high beams lit up on a tall figure standing in the middle of the road that my car was hurtling towards.

NO! I gasped, and hit the brakes, spinning my steering wheel.

I think I closed my eyes, hoping with a childlike naivety that if I didn’t see my car breaking the person in half, then it wouldn’t happen.

As the car stopped, facing the opposite direction, and snow gathered on the windshield, I was sure I didn’t hear the heavy thump of vehicular manslaughter.

This road, I thought to myself, as I gathered my thoughts and my breath.

Like an idiot, I checked on the health of Princess Sam’s birthday present in the back before I forced myself to get out of the car and check whether I’d just murdered someone.

I stepped out into the snow and wandered around the back of the car. Beyond the red illumination from my flashing brake lights, which only lit up about a metre of the road, it was cold, vast darkness. It was like peering out into the ocean, out off of the edge of the world.

Hello? I called out, unsure whether I wanted anyone to answer.

As my voice echoed through the darkness of the night, I realised how vulnerable I was. I hadn’t passed a single car.

The only person I’d seen for miles was someone standing out in the road, in the heart of nowhere.

Was I going to become a missing person? This was straight out of a horror movie. And I wasn’t Sam and Jude. They were horror lovers. Give me Real Housewives of wherever over A Nightmare on Elm Street any day of the week.

But Sam and her father had forced me to watch enough horror films to know that I was about to become a victim.

But there was just the minor matter of, had I killed someone? I had to be sure.

I stepped into the darkness, the thin layer of snow on the road crunching beneath my feet, and scanned the ground for blood or body parts or anything.

Is anybody there? I yelled into the void. Are you hurt?!?

Only my voice answered, mimicking me like a lost spirit wandering the roads, mocking the nurse who stood shivering in the night trying to get home.

Maybe it was a phantom, like one of those ghostly hitchhikers you hear about when you’re a kid. The spirit of some lost soul who got hit by a car on these fucking roads, waiting for its loved ones to pass.

Maybe it was Bertha.

I peered up to see the skeletal tree branches reaching out from the hedges on the side of the road, like giant hands with claws coming to scoop me up and whisk me off into the night.

The cold, echoing night, with only the bleak sound of nothingness.

Yeah, I thought. They’re gone.

I rushed back to the car, reversed and turned to face the right way again, and continued home.

I hurt nobody; it was all fine. It was time to get home and prepare the cottage for a very special little girl’s birthday tomorrow.

Those roads.

OUR HOME WAS A SMALL cottage halfway up a hill leading to that forest of nothingness.

By the time I got back, Jude already had the birthday bunting on the front door, for the three or four cars that might pass by the next day to see.

But let’s be real. It was for Princess Sam. And she was a Princess, the pure apple in Jude’s eye.

In a little less than twenty-four hours, it would be ten years to the hour that I pushed out that little bundle of joy that would change our lives forever. Twenty-five minutes past seven.

Jude and I had only been dating a few months after meeting at Jill’s birthday party.

We didn’t hit it off straight away. I’d just got out of a terrible relationship and wasn’t on the lookout for a new one.

But Jude was persistent. ‘Persistently insistent’ was how he put it. It meant insistent that they made us for each other, and persistent in making me believe it.

Eventually, I did.

Three months later, I missed a period.

We’d only done it one time, but he had super-sperm. It made me wonder if any other little Judes were running around for a while.

But nine months and a three-hour water birth later, none of that mattered. Because together we made Sam. As we both sat in a pool of my afterbirth in the hospital with Clubland Chillout playing under the dim lights, and I held her close to my chest, Sam looked up at both