Cassie Winslow is sixteen.  She has just lost her mother in a terrible accident.  Now, lonely and frightened, she has come to live with the father she barely knows and his new family in tiny False Harbor on Cape Cod.  For Cassie, the strange, unsettling dreams that come to her suddenly in the dead of night are merely the beginning.  Very soon, Cassie Winslow will come to know the terrifying powers that are her gift.  And in the village of False Harbor, nothing will ever be the same. Cassie Winslow is sixteen. She has just lost her mother in a terrible accident. Now, lonely and frightened, she has come to live with the father she barely knows and his new family in tiny False Harbor on Cape Cod. For Cassie, the strange, unsettling dreams that come to her suddenly in the dead of night are merely the beginning. Very soon, Cassie Winslow will come to know the terrifying powers that are her gift. And in the village of False Harbor, nothing will ever be the same. Cassie Winslow is sixteen.  She has just lost her mother in a terrible accident.  Now, lonely and frightened, she has come to live with the father she barely knows and his new family in tiny False Harbor on Cape Cod.  For Cassie, the strange, unsettling dreams that come to her suddenly in the dead of night are merely the beginning.  Very soon, Cassie Winslow will come to know the terrifying powers that are her gift.  And in the village of False Harbor, nothing will ever be the same. ow is sixteen.  She has just lost her mother in a terrible accident.  Now, lonely and frightened, she has come to live with the father she barely knows and his new family in tiny False Harbor on Cape Cod.  For Cassie, the strange, unsettling dreams that come to her suddenly in the dead of night are merely the beginning.  Very soon, Cassie Winslow will come to know the terrifying powers that are her gift.  And in the village of False Harbor, nothing will ever be the same. John Saul ’s first novel,  Suffer the Children , was an immediate million-copy bestseller. His other bestselling suspense novels include  Perfect Nightmare , Black Creek Crossing , and  The Presence. He is also the author of the  New York Times  bestselling serial thriller  The Blackstone Chronicles , initially published in six installments but now available in one complete volume. Saul divides his time between Seattle and Hawaii. Prologue   The sun was high in the cloudless blue sky, and had it not been for the faint trace of a breeze drifting in from the sea, the stiflingly humid heat of the August afternoon would have been unbearable. The beach was all but deserted. Only far away—much farther than she was allowed to go—could the little girl see the barely visible figures of the big children playing at the water’s edge. Once—and it didn’t matter how long ago it had been, for in her two-year-old world every day was forever and each week an eternity long forgotten—she had tottered toward the distant figures, her tiny hands reaching out as if she could touch them at any moment. But long before she had gotten close enough even to see them very well, she had felt the stinging slap of her mother’s hand and heard the horrible word.   “No!”   Even before the first scream of pain burst from her, she had felt herself being jerked around and dragged back in the direction from which she had come, the rough sand scraping the skin from her knees as a stream of unintelligible sound rained down on her from her mother’s looming face above. Though she didn’t know what all the words meant, the message was clear.   She had done something wrong. When they got back to the blanket, her mother would spank her, and then she would have to sit on the blanket even long after she had forgotten just why she was there or what she had done.   Today she watched the children playing in the distance for a while, but made no move to abandon her bucket and shovel and try to escape down the beach toward them. Though she no longer remembered exactly what would happen if she did, she knew going that way hurt, and she didn’t want to hurt.   She began digging in the sand with her shovel. In a little while there was a hole beside her, with water seeping into it as if by magic. She tried to splash the water out of the hole, but each time more water came in, and it always seemed to be just as deep.   She tried digging the hole deeper, but that didn’t work either. It kept filling up with water, and then the sides would cave in, and pretty soon the hole would be wider but almost all filled up again.   Then she noticed that if she dug into the sand at the bottom of the hole, and scooped up whole handfuls of the mixture of sand and water, she could dribble it out onto her legs in neat rounded drops that looked like tiny little gray pancakes.   And if she dribbled more on top of that, it looked like a whole stack of little pancakes.   Chuckling and clucking softly to herself, she began covering her legs with dribbles of sand, building