Mad Dog

A hundred years ago a town inside Nower County vanished. Everybody in it, in a single night. The buildings are still standing.

Charlie McClintock came home to bury her mother and empty the house. She was only planning to stay a few days, and then the county line stopped letting anybody across.

In her mother's attic she finds a school photograph of three first-graders in front of a falling-down shack. She cannot remember the day it was taken. She cannot remember the trip, or the mist, or the other two children, and the other two children are Sam Sheridan and Malachi Tackett, who she has known her whole life.

What none of the three of them remember is Gideon. A ghost town up Fearsome Hollow, emptied out in 1895, where the buildings are somehow no worse than the day they were built. A first-grade field trip in 1970. A fog that came down the mountain faster than a child could run. Hours that fit inside a single playing of one song. And an old woman who found them in it, put a piece of broken rock in each of their hands, and told them never to come back.

Charlie has worked out what the old woman was telling her. The people of Gideon did not vanish all at once. For three days they were still there, and nobody could see them.

Nower County has been sealed for two weeks.

Book two of Nowhere USA, a complete seven-book series. Like book one, it ends with the Jabberwock unexplained and Nower County still sealed. Five books left to find out why.