Excerpt from After She's Gone by Camilla Grebe, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Perhaps it was curiosity, or maybe I just wasn't that keen to go back to the boys yet, but I felt a sudden urge to examine the mushroom more closely.

What kind of mushroom would it be, at this time of the year, in the middle of the woods?

The only mushrooms I'd ever picked here were chanterelles.

I held the lighter closer to the crevice between the stones so that the dim illumination slowly revealed the object. Peeled off a few leaves and pulled a small fern out by its roots.

Yes, there was definitely something there. Something that ...

Still in a squat with my jeans around my ankles, I pushed my free hand in and poked the white smoothness. It felt hard, like stone or porcelain. Maybe an old bowl? Definitely not a mush-room.

I stretched a little more and rolled away the stone that lay on top of the bowl. The stone was smaller than the others and not very heavy, but still landed with a thud in the moss beside me.

And there it lay, the bowl or whatever it was. It was the size of a grapefruit, cracked on one side, with some kind of fibrous brown moss growing from it.

I stretched out my hand and felt those thin, dark threads. Rubbed them between my thumb and forefinger for a moment before my brain finally put the pieces of this puzzle together, and I realized what it was.

I dropped the lighter, stood up, took a few stumbling steps straight into the dark, and started screaming. A scream that came from deep inside and seemed to have no end. As if terror were pushing out every atom of oxygen in my body through my lungs.

When Kenny and Anders came to my rescue, I still had my pants down and my lungs had given new life to my scream.

The bowl was no bowl. The moss was no moss. It was a skull with long dark hair.

From the book After She's Gone by Camilla Grebe. Copyright (c) 2019 by Camilla Grebe. Reprinted by arrangement with Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.