The Second Gate

A court reporter is trained to preserve the record. At Tallow Cave, the record may be the most dangerous thing in the room.Ruth Ann "Rudy" Marsh expects an ordinary deposition when an elderly Kentucky witness begins correcting small words with obsessive precision. Then he describes a cave where two men with the same name came back-and where every attempt to decide which one was real only made things worse.That night, Rudy's transcript produces a page she never wrote.Soon she is underground with a cave-rescue specialist, a federal site-control contractor, and a family forced to face an impossible return. The deeper they go, the quieter the phenomenon becomes. People appear where they cannot be. Memories shift after they are questioned. Institutions demand a primary identity even when no one can prove there ever was one.And the returns are polite.To survive Tallow, Rudy will have to confront the instinct that has defined her entire career: the need to make the record complete.THE SECOND GATE is a claustrophobic supernatural horror novel about identity, memory, bureaucracy, and the terrifying pressure to force one clean truth onto something that refuses to have one.