Brian Harmon's Blog, page 2
December 17, 2015
A Matter of Time
It was only a matter of time...
The fifth Rushed book is almost here! When Eric finds a mysterious letter written twenty years before he was born, but describing events from his own life, his simple existence as a normal high school English teacher once again takes a bizarre turn into the weird.
Coming Christmas Eve 2015!
Read on for a sneak peek of the first two chapters of Rushed: A Matter of Time!
Chapter One
“I don’t care what anyone says. Truth is stranger than fiction.”“You have no idea,” muttered Eric without looking up from the box he was rummaging through. Chad looked across the desk at him, his owlish eyebrows raised. “What?”“Hm? Oh. Nothing.” He considered Eric for a moment, and then shrugged and looked back down at the papers stacked in front of him. “Truth is stranger,” he said again. “And much more interesting.” Eric used to argue this point with him for hours at a time, but somewhere between his first run-in with a golem and that business with the insane, sentient mansion where he first met the little girl who lived in his cell phone, it became clear to him that Chad was right on that particular point, even if Chad couldn’t possibly comprehend just how right he was. “I mean, what’s the point in wasting your time reading something someone just made up?”This was where Eric drew the line, however. “Human imagination is infinitely more vast than human history.”“Vast, maybe. But also useless.”He knew this argument well enough. Chad was teasing him, egging him on. But he played along. “History would be pretty boring if no one ever had any imagination.” “It would certainly be easier to research.”“That’s probably true,” agreed Eric. It only took a few imaginativejournalists to turn any simple truth into a convoluted fantasy. It was impossible to know how much of what we accepted as history was actually history and how much of it was fabricated for one reason or another. (Especially given some of the things he’d learned about the world in the past couple years.) “But if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather just focus on the task in front of us.”Chad shrugged and did that stroking thing he liked to do with his beard. (He thought it made him look distinguished, but Eric thought it only made him look like he was trying to look distinguished, which he was pretty sure was exactly the opposite.) “I suppose so.”Between them, the desk in Chad’s classroom was buried under cardboard boxes filled with stacks upon stacks of old papers. A lot of it was research of one kind or another, but the vast majority of it was forty years of middle school English writing projects. “Did you ever meet Terence?”Eric shook his head. “He retired before I came along. Just by a year or two.”“I had him all three years of middle school.” Chad Whelt was only five years older than Eric, but he was the youngest of eight children and it delighted him to be anyone’s senior. The result was that he sometimes managed to sound less like thirty-eight than eighty-eight. Now he gazed off into the corner of the room as if recalling some long-lost golden age of his youth and said wistfully, “He was a really good teacher.”“So I’ve heard.” Terence Gawes taught English at Creek Bend Middle School for almost four decades before retiring in 1996. In the twenty years since then, he’d written a few little-known crime novels. Eric had read them all, but he couldn’t honestly say that he was a fan. The dialogue was unnecessarily wordy and unconvincing. He was pretty sure that people in 1930s Chicago didn’t talk like…well, like stuck-up English teachers, frankly. Gawes was much better known for a short series of books on Creek Bend’s German heritage and his work in the town’s historical society, where he’d collaborated with Chad on a number of projects over the years. The former teacher, author and historian had passed away a few weeks ago, and his widow had entrusted Chad to sort through his papers and donate anything of academic value to the school and museum, the two things he’d loved most after his own home and family. “I just don’t see the point in saving all this stuff. I mean, it’s middle school. Most of these kids didn’t care about the assignment. Hell, I can’t even read most of them.”“True. But every now and then you get one who surprises you.”Chad pulled out a large stack of yellowed papers and shook them at him. “Not this many.” Eric had to laugh. “No. I wouldn’t think so.” And he didn’t blame him for getting frustrated. They’d already been at it for two hours, and it didn’t seem like they were making any headway. Both of them were beginning to doubt that there was anything of any value in all this mess. Chad dropped the stack of papers onto his desk and started shuffling through them. The high school was quiet today. Summer vacation had begun. The kids were gone. Only a few teachers were in the building, finishing up whatever work needed done before graduation day on Sunday. Eric liked these last quiet days of the school year. He liked the peacefulness. But he was quickly growing bored with thisproject.“Sixth grade creative writing assignment. Nineteen…” Chad squinted at the top paper on the stack in front of him, trying to read the faded print. “Sixty-two? Wow. He would’ve been...what? Twenty-seven? Twenty-eight? Can you imagine him that young?”“Like I said, I never really knew him.” He was pretty sure he’d only ever met the man face-to-face a few times in his entire life, and those encounters had been little more than a polite introduction and handshake. “Right.” Chad began going through the decades-old papers, glancing over each one and then systematically dropping them into the trash. Eric could think of roughly a million things he’d rather be doing this afternoon, but Chad was his friend and he’d promised to help with this project. Still, he hadn’t expected there to be so much. At the rate they were going, it was going to take weeks to sort through it all. But there were little treasures scattered throughout the hoard. They’d already found some of the notes on his published works, along with some research for books he never got around to starting. And the school was sure to be interested in some of the student work he’d accumulated in his forty years. Some of the research papers he’d assigned addressed current events of the time, like the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the Berlin Wall and the Watergate scandal, among others. He’d also discovered a handpicked collection of favorite poems and short fiction written by his many students over the decades. Rhoda Inman, the school’s superintendent, was always on the lookout for this sort of stuff. Chad chuckled. “Here you go,” he said, holding out one of the papers for him to look at. “Mr. Future.”“What?”“You like imagination. Here’s an imaginative one for you.” Eric took the page and examined it. It was written by a boy named Hector Conant in much neater handwriting than most of his students used today. It was in the form of a letter addressed to a “Mr. Future”:
Dear Mr. Future,
I had a dream about you last night. I saw your face. I saw the things you’ve done. I heard the words you’ve spoken. I know a dream is only a dream. People tell me that all the time. But the truth is that sometimes my dreams come true. Sometimes. When a dream is particularly vivid. And the dream I dreamed about you was the most real dream I’ve ever dreamed in my life. Deep in my heart, I know you are real. And I know I dreamed about you for a reason. I need your help.No one here can help me. No one will believe me. But you would believe me. You would help me. It’s what you do. I saw it in my dream. You help people who need help, when no one else can. And you have done such amazing things. I saw you walking between worlds. I saw you conversing with the dead and escaping unstoppable monsters. I saw you descend into hell and claim an incredible secret. I saw you climb an invisible tower and bargain with a terrible god. You faced witches and goblins and swam with lake monsters and stopped the world from being eaten.And now I need your help. But you are Mr. Future. You are in a world I barely understand. I’m not sure you are born yet, or even if you will be born in my lifetime. For all the amazing things you do, I am sure you cannot travel back in time. I have to face the fact that I am on my own. But maybe, if only in my dreams, you can show me what I should do. You see, two men arrived in our town a few days ago. They are not normal men. I dreamed about them, too, but it wasn’t a nice dream. It wasn’t at all like the dream I had about you. These are bad men. They have strange powers. They are looking for something. And they have terrible plans for when they find it. You know who they are. I dreamed that, too. But for all my dreams have shown me, I still don’t know why they are here. I have to find out what they are up to. I know I have to stop them. I know it just like I know that you are real. If I don’t, I believe a lot of people are going to die. I also dreamed that you found this letter. That’s how I know you’ll one day read it. I’m going to look for the bad men after school. If I find anything, I’ll leave a message with Mr. Silver. I don’t understand why, but I feel very strongly that I should write to you again.
I really wish you were here,Hector Conant
Eric stared at the page, hardly believing what he’d just read. It’d begun innocently enough. It seemed to be a creative attempt at some simple, experimental fiction. A short story of sorts in the form of a letter to a made-up man from a dream, a man from the future. But those things he wrote…I saw you walking between worlds. I saw you conversing with the dead and escaping unstoppable monsters. I saw you descend into hell and claim an incredible secret. That described eerily well the experience he had almost two years ago, when he first discovered that there were incredible things in the world. He did, indeed, walk between worlds. More accurately, he’d followed a fissure north through Wisconsin, a sort of crack between this world and another. He’d encountered ghosts on that journey. And he narrowly escaped a trio of golems, frightful, incomprehensible beasts that couldn’t be stopped, only distracted, and only then by something considerable…like two fistfuls of dynamite… And in the end, at his final destination, he descended into a great, dark pit, at the bottom of which really was an incredible secret, something so profound that he couldn’t handle it. It had to be buried in his subconscious mind, where only his dreams could access it. But that was only the beginning of his adventures. The following summer he discovered strange, unseen sites all over this very town. Invisiblesites. I saw you climb an invisible tower and bargain with a terrible god. The tower of the old, forgotten high school, unseen for decades, invisible to all without a special shard of glass from a mysterious, broken artifact. But it wasn’t a god that he bargained with. Not exactly, anyway. It was a jinn. You faced witches and goblins and swam with lake monsters and stopped the world from being eaten. Indeed he had. He met an entire coven of witches in Illinois. There were no goblins, precisely, but there were plenty of goblin-like imps and ogres and even a few giants in those endless fields. And he’d nearly been eaten by a monstrous fish in a lake in Upper Michigan. And he’d prevented a potentially devastating disaster while he was up there. Chad chuckled again. “It’s clever. I’ll give him that. Everyone knew Terence kept all those assignments. Any letter would be found by some ‘Mr. Future’ or another. Or Mrs., I suppose.”“Yeah,” said Eric. “Clever.” Much more so than he could ever know. Chad read this letter and saw only the creative imaginings of a boy, but this letter wasn’t fiction at all. It was real. Hector Conant was actually writing to a man he saw in his dreams. A man who really was from the future and would one day have this very letter find its way into his hands. That future had now become the present, and Eric was that man. He didn’t even waste time trying to rationalize it. This was the fifth time his life was interrupted by the strangeness of the world. By now, he recognized it when the weird came to call on him. He even recognized the two “bad men” of which Hector had spoken. Strange men with frightful powers… They sounded remarkably like the nameless agents he’d run into on two separate occasions. They were all dangerous psychopaths who worked for a mysterious organization with an unhealthy interest in all things weird and unnatural. The same organization was responsible for a devastating fire in 1881. If they were back in Creek Bend again in 1962, then Hector really was in trouble. I need your help. But he was Mr. Future. He was now. And Hector was the past. He was then. All that would happen to this boy had already happened. Nothing would change that. His cell phone came to life in his pocket, alerting him to a new text message. “Since when do you keep your phone on?” asked Chad. Eric fished the phone from his front pocket. “Karen,” he lied. The truth was that the phone was off. Or, at least, it was set to the “do not disturb” feature, which wasn’t the same as being off, but made sure the stupid thing stayed quiet during class, he guessed. (He still didn’t really know how this new phone worked.) But calls and messages from Isabelle always came through, which was a good thing, because Isabelle was the one person he wanted to always be able to reach him. IT’S TOTALLY POSSIBLE FOR THAT BOY TO HAVE SEEN YOU IN HIS DREAMSShe was right. He’d had more than one prophetic dream himself. But dreaming of people and events that were decades in the future? What good would that do? AND THOSE DO TOTALLY SOUND LIKE AGENTSEric read the letter again. Strangely, the thing about it that he found most absurd wasn’t that the boy seemed to actually be talking to him. (Not two months ago he’d shared a brief conversation with a man’s severed head, after all.) It was that Mr. Gawes had only awarded Hector a barely passing D for his trouble. He’d even made notes in the margin about it being lazy, unrealistic and without resolution. “In the future, please try to remain within the parameters of the assignment,” was scrawled across the top in red ink. “That’s crap,” he muttered. Chad looked up at him again. “What?”“I would’ve given him at least a B. Just for creativity.” Chad gave him a bewildered look. HE SOUNDS LIKE HE’S IN REAL TROUBLEBut that was over fifty years ago, thought Eric. Whatever trouble he was in was done and over with two decades before I was even born.BUT THERE MUST BE SOME REASON WHY YOU FOUND THAT LETTER. THINGS DON’T HAPPEN TO YOU JUST BY CHANCEThat was certainly true. But he simply couldn’t comprehend what that reason might be. He couldn’t change the past. He couldn’t even communicate with the boy. All he could do was read his letter. HE SAID HE’D LEAVE ANOTHER MESSAGE FOR YOUWITH MR. SILVERMr. Silver. She didn’t ask him if he knew what that meant. Although the few people who knew about her frequently joked about her being “the little girl who lived in his phone,” she didn’t actually live in his phone. The phone was merely the tool that allowed her to speak to him. She was out there in the world somewhere, traveling between mysterious locations that existed in a strange state of duality, straddling rifts between two or more worlds. She was trapped in that mysterious, timeless realm, but she was never entirely alone. The two of them shared a psychic link that allowed her constant access to his mind. Although she was able and willing to tune him out and give him his privacy when appropriate, she was capable of reading his every thought at any given moment. She knew very well that he knew who Mr. Silver was. YOU NEED TO LOOK INTO THIS. NOWEric folded the letter twice and then went to drop it in the trash can, but while Chad was looking through his papers, he instead slipped it into his pocket along with the phone. “I’m sorry. I’ve got to go.”“Everything all right?” asked Chad. The look of genuine concern that crossed his face made Eric feel guilty about lying, but Isabelle was right. He needed to look into this. “Karen’s having some car trouble. I need to go and help her out.”He sat up, as if suddenly very interested in the subject of car repair. “Need any help?”“No. I’ve got it.”Chad looked disappointedly at the mountain of papers in front of him. “Oh.”“Don’t worry about this,” he said, motioning at the boxes. “I promised to help and I will.”“I’m not worried at all,” said Chad. “I’m about ready to give up for the day anyway. I’ll stick around for a little while longer, then I’ll just head home early. We can finish it on Monday.”Eric started toward the door. “Sounds good. I won’t let you down.”“I know you won’t. Good luck with the car. Tell Karen I said hi.”“Sure. See you later.” He walked calmly out the door and then hurried out to the parking lot. He couldn’t go straight to see Mr. Silver. He was going to need to stop at home first. And all the way there, he pondered the boy’s letter. Even accepting that the boy really did dream about him and his strange adventures (which, in itself, was no stranger than those very adventures, after all) and that the letter really was meant for him, what were the odds of it actually finding him? Sure, Hector would’ve probably known that his English teacher kept all these assignments and that someone, someday, might come across it. Might. That was assuming someone didn’t just throw out the entire box without looking through it, which would’ve made more sense than going to the trouble of sorting through it all, in Eric’s opinion. But it wasn’t as if Gawes, himself had sought him out to deliver the letter. He’d happened to befriend a former student, who, like Eric, wasn’t even born when the letter was written. If Chad hadn’t been in Gawes’ class, or if the two of them hadn’t both been members of the Creek Bend Historical Society, or if Chad and Eric had not been friends, or if either of them had done something different with their lives than choosing to teach at the same high school, it never would’ve found him. Chad probably would’ve tossed the letter in the trash without another thought. For that matter, what if Mrs. Gawes hadn’t entrusted her late husband’s intellectual estate to Chad? Or even if Eric had not been free to help him on this particular day? I THINK YOU’RE OVERTHINKING IT, said Isabelle. The phone was resting in the PT Cruiser’s cup holder, where he could see the screen. “Am I?”HE SAID IN THE LETTER THAT HE SAW IT FINDING YOU IN HIS DREAMS. HE SAW THAT IF HE TURNED THE LETTER IN AS AN ASSIGNMENT, THAT YOU’D ONE DAY READ ITThat was true, he supposed…NOTHING THAT CAME BETWEEN MATTERED. ALL HE NEEDED TO KNOW WAS THAT YOU’D READ IT IF HE GAVE IT TO MR. GAWES“It just seems a little convoluted to me.”YOU WERE CHOSEN TO HAVE THE DREAMS YOU HAD, she reminded him. YOU WERE CHOSEN FOR ALL THE AMAZING THINGS YOU’VE DONE. WHY COULDN’T YOU BE CHOSEN TO FIND HECTOR’S LETTER?“You’re right.”OF COURSE I AMEric frowned at the screen. “You’ve been spending too much time talking to Karen.”THAT DOESN’T CHANGE THE FACT THAT I’M RIGHTNo, it certainly didn’t. But it was still annoying.
Chapter Two
Karen was in the kitchen, as usual. A half-dozen strawberry pies were cooling on the countertop (her modest contribution to the big bake sale at the library tomorrow morning) and she was tidying up after herself. She was understandably surprised to see him.“Home already?” she asked.Eric walked past the kitchen and into the hallway. “Only for a minute,” he replied. He opened the closet door and began rummaging inside. Karen leaned against the doorway and watched him. “Is this one of those surprise inspections to try and catch me and my illicit lover red handed? Because he usually hides under the bed.”“That’s right, I always forget he can fit under there. Where’re the garden tools?”“In the basement. You going to chase him off with a rake?”Eric closed the closet door and walked back through the kitchen, giving her a quick kiss on the cheek as he squeezed past her. “I need a shovel.”“Now you’re just getting ahead of yourself.” “Well, I do like to plan ahead.” He opened the basement door and hurried down the steps. Karen’s gardening basket was there in the corner. “You’re acting weird. Is everything okay?” He grabbed a hand trowel and then turned and started up the steps again. “You might want to grab a bigger one,” she told him. “I’m no expert, but I think it’d take a long time to dig a grave with that.” “I only need to make a little hole.” “Ouch. You’re scary good at this jealous husband thing.” She took a step back and let him pass. “I’m not sure whether to be really disturbed or really turned on.” She brushed a loose strand of brown hair away from her lovely face and followed him. “Is it weird that I’m pretty sure I’m leaning toward ‘really turned on’?” Eric placed the trowel on the table and checked his watch. It was almost one o’clock in the afternoon. “Huh?”“Seriously,” she said, taking him by the arm. “You’re starting to freak me out. What’s going on?”He turned and met her gaze. “It’s…um…”Those beautiful, brown eyes narrowed. “Weirdness?” she asked. Eric sighed. “I think so.” He pulled Hector’s letter from his pocket and handed it to her. She unfolded it and read the first line. “Mr. Future?”“Chad found that in one of Mr. Gawes’ boxes. It was written by a sixth grader more than fifty years ago.”Karen began to read. After a moment, she creased her eyebrows and said, “Wait… Is he talking about you?”“About me and to me.”She finished reading the letter and looked up at him again. “Who’s Mr. Silver?”“A clue to tell me where to find another letter.” “And you know who he’s talking about?”“I can’t be positive until I check. But yeah. I think so.”“So you’re just going to run off and do your thing again? Get yourself hurt? Scare me to death?”Eric stood staring at her. “I’m sorry.”She rolled her eyes. “I know you are. You’re always sorry.” She looked down at the letter again. “These are agents, aren’t they?”Not much got by her. She was a very bright woman. And he didn’t keep secrets from her. She knew everything about every one of his adventures, with the sole exception that he sometimes told her that his close calls weren’t as close as they really were. And he was pretty sure he wasn’t even fooling her about that. “What does Isabelle say about this?”“She says I have to look into it. She doesn’t believe in coincidences.”“And neither do I.” She read through the letter again and then handed it back to him. “I’m coming with you this time.”He thought for a second that he must’ve misheard her. “What? No. Absolutely not.”But he might as well have been talking gibberish, because she ignored him and hurried off to put on her shoes. He called after her: “I’m serious. It might be dangerous.”“You said yourself that letter is over fifty years old,” she called back from the hallway. “What could possibly be dangerous about it?”Eric looked down at the letter again. He had a very vivid imagination. He’d always had a very vivid imagination. And he could think of a lot of things that might be dangerous about it. There were agents involved. Those guys were always bad news. For all he knew, they might still be alive and lurking around. He doubted if elderly agents would be any less dangerous than young ones. Or for all he knew, some agents might not even age. He’d met a man just a few weeks ago who claimed to have been alive for several hundred years. “These things always turn out to be a lot more than they first appear.”“We’re just looking for a second letter,” she reasoned. She wasn’t backing down, so he changed his strategy to one that never failed. “You have too much to do,” he argued. She was a freelance cake decorator and caterer, and a damn good one. She made good money off her talents, and they typically kept her busy. Especially on the weekends. But today was going to be different. “I’m already done with everything,” she countered. “The bake sale?”“Done.”“What about that potluck at the church?”“That’s not until Sunday. I won’t even start that until tomorrow.”“Didn’t you have a graduation cake, too?”“Two of them. I delivered both of them this morning.” She walked back into the room and took her cell phone from the charger, then she turned and gave him a quick kiss on his lips. “Bonus points for paying attention to my life, though.”“I don’t want bonus points,” huffed Eric as she hurried out of the room to grab her purse. “I want you to stay home where it’s safe.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket and said, “Tell her she needs to stay home where it’s safe.”I’M NOT THE BOSS OF HER, replied Isabelle.“Isabelle agrees with me,” said Eric. HEY!But Karen didn’t seem to be listening. “So do you think this Hector kid is like you? Your stuff started with dreams, too.”“Yeah, but I didn’t dream about things that wouldn’t happen for fifty years.”She walked back into the room, already slipping her sunglasses onto her face. Her hair was tied back now. It was amazing how good she managed to look in something as simple as a pair of khaki shorts and a scoop neck tee shirt. “No, but you dreamed about things that would happen in the next few hours. Sort of…”Eric gave his head one of those wobbles that wasn’t quite a yes or a no. The first time the weirdness crashed into his life, it started with a dream that woke him in the middle of the night with a pressing urge to get up and leave. But he couldn’t remember what the dream was about, so he ignored it. After three nights of this, he gave in to the compulsion and took a drive. What followed was a terrifying trek through a monster-infested fissure between two worlds. It turned out that the dream was showing him the things he would see and do, but only as they would’ve happened if he’d left the first time he awoke. By leaving two days later, things had changed. So technically, that had been a dream about the future. It just wasn’t the future that actually came to be. And it had only revealed a few hours to him, less than a single day, not even close to Hector’s fifty-four years.“Maybe he had adventures like you do,” suggested Karen. “Maybe,” said Eric. “It’s really interesting.” She picked up the trowel and handed it to him. “I want to see what you dig up.”“I always keep you posted,” he reminded her. “This time you won’t have to. And, I can keep an eye on you. Make sure you don’t go visiting any strip clubs.”Eric groaned. “One time! I didn’t even want to be there! Isabelle even told you I didn’t want to be there!”But she’d already turned and was on her way out the door. Eric followed after her. “I’m serious. This kid mentioned agents, remember? Those guys are bad news.”“Those guys are probably collecting social security by now. If they even live that long. It’s got to be a hazardous line of work. You killed three of them yourself.”Eric glanced around, startled. “Can we not talk about that outside?”Karen opened the passenger door of the silver PT Cruiser and climbed inside. “Sorry, killer.”“Seriously?” He sat behind the wheel and slammed the door. “And I didn’t kill any of them. I just…didn’t save them…”“What does it matter? They all had it coming.”“Did they?” asked Eric. She lowered her sunglasses and met his eyes. “You never had a choice. Not even in Illinois. You did what you had to do every time.”He shook his head and started the engine. She was right about the rest of them. The foggy man in Minnesota, the two agents here in Creek Bend last year, even the psychotic and inhuman Jonah Fettarsetter in Michigan…all of them had been cold-blooded killers with deadly agendas. He had no choice but to stop them. But the girl in Illinois was different… He was sure there was another way. He just wasn’t wise enough to find it.Karen didn’t say anything else about it. She knew it bothered him how those encounters went down. Instead, she pushed her sunglasses back into place and said, “So where’re we going?” Eric began backing out of the driveway. He wasn’t going to win this one. He’d known that from the start. She was coming with him whether he liked it or not. Few forces on this planet were as powerful as his wife’s stubbornness. “Boxlar Road,” he replied. “To see Mr. Silver.”
Don't miss what happens next! Rushed: A Matter of Time goes on sale Christmas Eve. Preorder your copy now at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B018....
The fifth Rushed book is almost here! When Eric finds a mysterious letter written twenty years before he was born, but describing events from his own life, his simple existence as a normal high school English teacher once again takes a bizarre turn into the weird.
Coming Christmas Eve 2015!
Read on for a sneak peek of the first two chapters of Rushed: A Matter of Time!
Chapter One
“I don’t care what anyone says. Truth is stranger than fiction.”“You have no idea,” muttered Eric without looking up from the box he was rummaging through. Chad looked across the desk at him, his owlish eyebrows raised. “What?”“Hm? Oh. Nothing.” He considered Eric for a moment, and then shrugged and looked back down at the papers stacked in front of him. “Truth is stranger,” he said again. “And much more interesting.” Eric used to argue this point with him for hours at a time, but somewhere between his first run-in with a golem and that business with the insane, sentient mansion where he first met the little girl who lived in his cell phone, it became clear to him that Chad was right on that particular point, even if Chad couldn’t possibly comprehend just how right he was. “I mean, what’s the point in wasting your time reading something someone just made up?”This was where Eric drew the line, however. “Human imagination is infinitely more vast than human history.”“Vast, maybe. But also useless.”He knew this argument well enough. Chad was teasing him, egging him on. But he played along. “History would be pretty boring if no one ever had any imagination.” “It would certainly be easier to research.”“That’s probably true,” agreed Eric. It only took a few imaginativejournalists to turn any simple truth into a convoluted fantasy. It was impossible to know how much of what we accepted as history was actually history and how much of it was fabricated for one reason or another. (Especially given some of the things he’d learned about the world in the past couple years.) “But if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather just focus on the task in front of us.”Chad shrugged and did that stroking thing he liked to do with his beard. (He thought it made him look distinguished, but Eric thought it only made him look like he was trying to look distinguished, which he was pretty sure was exactly the opposite.) “I suppose so.”Between them, the desk in Chad’s classroom was buried under cardboard boxes filled with stacks upon stacks of old papers. A lot of it was research of one kind or another, but the vast majority of it was forty years of middle school English writing projects. “Did you ever meet Terence?”Eric shook his head. “He retired before I came along. Just by a year or two.”“I had him all three years of middle school.” Chad Whelt was only five years older than Eric, but he was the youngest of eight children and it delighted him to be anyone’s senior. The result was that he sometimes managed to sound less like thirty-eight than eighty-eight. Now he gazed off into the corner of the room as if recalling some long-lost golden age of his youth and said wistfully, “He was a really good teacher.”“So I’ve heard.” Terence Gawes taught English at Creek Bend Middle School for almost four decades before retiring in 1996. In the twenty years since then, he’d written a few little-known crime novels. Eric had read them all, but he couldn’t honestly say that he was a fan. The dialogue was unnecessarily wordy and unconvincing. He was pretty sure that people in 1930s Chicago didn’t talk like…well, like stuck-up English teachers, frankly. Gawes was much better known for a short series of books on Creek Bend’s German heritage and his work in the town’s historical society, where he’d collaborated with Chad on a number of projects over the years. The former teacher, author and historian had passed away a few weeks ago, and his widow had entrusted Chad to sort through his papers and donate anything of academic value to the school and museum, the two things he’d loved most after his own home and family. “I just don’t see the point in saving all this stuff. I mean, it’s middle school. Most of these kids didn’t care about the assignment. Hell, I can’t even read most of them.”“True. But every now and then you get one who surprises you.”Chad pulled out a large stack of yellowed papers and shook them at him. “Not this many.” Eric had to laugh. “No. I wouldn’t think so.” And he didn’t blame him for getting frustrated. They’d already been at it for two hours, and it didn’t seem like they were making any headway. Both of them were beginning to doubt that there was anything of any value in all this mess. Chad dropped the stack of papers onto his desk and started shuffling through them. The high school was quiet today. Summer vacation had begun. The kids were gone. Only a few teachers were in the building, finishing up whatever work needed done before graduation day on Sunday. Eric liked these last quiet days of the school year. He liked the peacefulness. But he was quickly growing bored with thisproject.“Sixth grade creative writing assignment. Nineteen…” Chad squinted at the top paper on the stack in front of him, trying to read the faded print. “Sixty-two? Wow. He would’ve been...what? Twenty-seven? Twenty-eight? Can you imagine him that young?”“Like I said, I never really knew him.” He was pretty sure he’d only ever met the man face-to-face a few times in his entire life, and those encounters had been little more than a polite introduction and handshake. “Right.” Chad began going through the decades-old papers, glancing over each one and then systematically dropping them into the trash. Eric could think of roughly a million things he’d rather be doing this afternoon, but Chad was his friend and he’d promised to help with this project. Still, he hadn’t expected there to be so much. At the rate they were going, it was going to take weeks to sort through it all. But there were little treasures scattered throughout the hoard. They’d already found some of the notes on his published works, along with some research for books he never got around to starting. And the school was sure to be interested in some of the student work he’d accumulated in his forty years. Some of the research papers he’d assigned addressed current events of the time, like the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the Berlin Wall and the Watergate scandal, among others. He’d also discovered a handpicked collection of favorite poems and short fiction written by his many students over the decades. Rhoda Inman, the school’s superintendent, was always on the lookout for this sort of stuff. Chad chuckled. “Here you go,” he said, holding out one of the papers for him to look at. “Mr. Future.”“What?”“You like imagination. Here’s an imaginative one for you.” Eric took the page and examined it. It was written by a boy named Hector Conant in much neater handwriting than most of his students used today. It was in the form of a letter addressed to a “Mr. Future”:
Dear Mr. Future,
I had a dream about you last night. I saw your face. I saw the things you’ve done. I heard the words you’ve spoken. I know a dream is only a dream. People tell me that all the time. But the truth is that sometimes my dreams come true. Sometimes. When a dream is particularly vivid. And the dream I dreamed about you was the most real dream I’ve ever dreamed in my life. Deep in my heart, I know you are real. And I know I dreamed about you for a reason. I need your help.No one here can help me. No one will believe me. But you would believe me. You would help me. It’s what you do. I saw it in my dream. You help people who need help, when no one else can. And you have done such amazing things. I saw you walking between worlds. I saw you conversing with the dead and escaping unstoppable monsters. I saw you descend into hell and claim an incredible secret. I saw you climb an invisible tower and bargain with a terrible god. You faced witches and goblins and swam with lake monsters and stopped the world from being eaten.And now I need your help. But you are Mr. Future. You are in a world I barely understand. I’m not sure you are born yet, or even if you will be born in my lifetime. For all the amazing things you do, I am sure you cannot travel back in time. I have to face the fact that I am on my own. But maybe, if only in my dreams, you can show me what I should do. You see, two men arrived in our town a few days ago. They are not normal men. I dreamed about them, too, but it wasn’t a nice dream. It wasn’t at all like the dream I had about you. These are bad men. They have strange powers. They are looking for something. And they have terrible plans for when they find it. You know who they are. I dreamed that, too. But for all my dreams have shown me, I still don’t know why they are here. I have to find out what they are up to. I know I have to stop them. I know it just like I know that you are real. If I don’t, I believe a lot of people are going to die. I also dreamed that you found this letter. That’s how I know you’ll one day read it. I’m going to look for the bad men after school. If I find anything, I’ll leave a message with Mr. Silver. I don’t understand why, but I feel very strongly that I should write to you again.
I really wish you were here,Hector Conant
Eric stared at the page, hardly believing what he’d just read. It’d begun innocently enough. It seemed to be a creative attempt at some simple, experimental fiction. A short story of sorts in the form of a letter to a made-up man from a dream, a man from the future. But those things he wrote…I saw you walking between worlds. I saw you conversing with the dead and escaping unstoppable monsters. I saw you descend into hell and claim an incredible secret. That described eerily well the experience he had almost two years ago, when he first discovered that there were incredible things in the world. He did, indeed, walk between worlds. More accurately, he’d followed a fissure north through Wisconsin, a sort of crack between this world and another. He’d encountered ghosts on that journey. And he narrowly escaped a trio of golems, frightful, incomprehensible beasts that couldn’t be stopped, only distracted, and only then by something considerable…like two fistfuls of dynamite… And in the end, at his final destination, he descended into a great, dark pit, at the bottom of which really was an incredible secret, something so profound that he couldn’t handle it. It had to be buried in his subconscious mind, where only his dreams could access it. But that was only the beginning of his adventures. The following summer he discovered strange, unseen sites all over this very town. Invisiblesites. I saw you climb an invisible tower and bargain with a terrible god. The tower of the old, forgotten high school, unseen for decades, invisible to all without a special shard of glass from a mysterious, broken artifact. But it wasn’t a god that he bargained with. Not exactly, anyway. It was a jinn. You faced witches and goblins and swam with lake monsters and stopped the world from being eaten. Indeed he had. He met an entire coven of witches in Illinois. There were no goblins, precisely, but there were plenty of goblin-like imps and ogres and even a few giants in those endless fields. And he’d nearly been eaten by a monstrous fish in a lake in Upper Michigan. And he’d prevented a potentially devastating disaster while he was up there. Chad chuckled again. “It’s clever. I’ll give him that. Everyone knew Terence kept all those assignments. Any letter would be found by some ‘Mr. Future’ or another. Or Mrs., I suppose.”“Yeah,” said Eric. “Clever.” Much more so than he could ever know. Chad read this letter and saw only the creative imaginings of a boy, but this letter wasn’t fiction at all. It was real. Hector Conant was actually writing to a man he saw in his dreams. A man who really was from the future and would one day have this very letter find its way into his hands. That future had now become the present, and Eric was that man. He didn’t even waste time trying to rationalize it. This was the fifth time his life was interrupted by the strangeness of the world. By now, he recognized it when the weird came to call on him. He even recognized the two “bad men” of which Hector had spoken. Strange men with frightful powers… They sounded remarkably like the nameless agents he’d run into on two separate occasions. They were all dangerous psychopaths who worked for a mysterious organization with an unhealthy interest in all things weird and unnatural. The same organization was responsible for a devastating fire in 1881. If they were back in Creek Bend again in 1962, then Hector really was in trouble. I need your help. But he was Mr. Future. He was now. And Hector was the past. He was then. All that would happen to this boy had already happened. Nothing would change that. His cell phone came to life in his pocket, alerting him to a new text message. “Since when do you keep your phone on?” asked Chad. Eric fished the phone from his front pocket. “Karen,” he lied. The truth was that the phone was off. Or, at least, it was set to the “do not disturb” feature, which wasn’t the same as being off, but made sure the stupid thing stayed quiet during class, he guessed. (He still didn’t really know how this new phone worked.) But calls and messages from Isabelle always came through, which was a good thing, because Isabelle was the one person he wanted to always be able to reach him. IT’S TOTALLY POSSIBLE FOR THAT BOY TO HAVE SEEN YOU IN HIS DREAMSShe was right. He’d had more than one prophetic dream himself. But dreaming of people and events that were decades in the future? What good would that do? AND THOSE DO TOTALLY SOUND LIKE AGENTSEric read the letter again. Strangely, the thing about it that he found most absurd wasn’t that the boy seemed to actually be talking to him. (Not two months ago he’d shared a brief conversation with a man’s severed head, after all.) It was that Mr. Gawes had only awarded Hector a barely passing D for his trouble. He’d even made notes in the margin about it being lazy, unrealistic and without resolution. “In the future, please try to remain within the parameters of the assignment,” was scrawled across the top in red ink. “That’s crap,” he muttered. Chad looked up at him again. “What?”“I would’ve given him at least a B. Just for creativity.” Chad gave him a bewildered look. HE SOUNDS LIKE HE’S IN REAL TROUBLEBut that was over fifty years ago, thought Eric. Whatever trouble he was in was done and over with two decades before I was even born.BUT THERE MUST BE SOME REASON WHY YOU FOUND THAT LETTER. THINGS DON’T HAPPEN TO YOU JUST BY CHANCEThat was certainly true. But he simply couldn’t comprehend what that reason might be. He couldn’t change the past. He couldn’t even communicate with the boy. All he could do was read his letter. HE SAID HE’D LEAVE ANOTHER MESSAGE FOR YOUWITH MR. SILVERMr. Silver. She didn’t ask him if he knew what that meant. Although the few people who knew about her frequently joked about her being “the little girl who lived in his phone,” she didn’t actually live in his phone. The phone was merely the tool that allowed her to speak to him. She was out there in the world somewhere, traveling between mysterious locations that existed in a strange state of duality, straddling rifts between two or more worlds. She was trapped in that mysterious, timeless realm, but she was never entirely alone. The two of them shared a psychic link that allowed her constant access to his mind. Although she was able and willing to tune him out and give him his privacy when appropriate, she was capable of reading his every thought at any given moment. She knew very well that he knew who Mr. Silver was. YOU NEED TO LOOK INTO THIS. NOWEric folded the letter twice and then went to drop it in the trash can, but while Chad was looking through his papers, he instead slipped it into his pocket along with the phone. “I’m sorry. I’ve got to go.”“Everything all right?” asked Chad. The look of genuine concern that crossed his face made Eric feel guilty about lying, but Isabelle was right. He needed to look into this. “Karen’s having some car trouble. I need to go and help her out.”He sat up, as if suddenly very interested in the subject of car repair. “Need any help?”“No. I’ve got it.”Chad looked disappointedly at the mountain of papers in front of him. “Oh.”“Don’t worry about this,” he said, motioning at the boxes. “I promised to help and I will.”“I’m not worried at all,” said Chad. “I’m about ready to give up for the day anyway. I’ll stick around for a little while longer, then I’ll just head home early. We can finish it on Monday.”Eric started toward the door. “Sounds good. I won’t let you down.”“I know you won’t. Good luck with the car. Tell Karen I said hi.”“Sure. See you later.” He walked calmly out the door and then hurried out to the parking lot. He couldn’t go straight to see Mr. Silver. He was going to need to stop at home first. And all the way there, he pondered the boy’s letter. Even accepting that the boy really did dream about him and his strange adventures (which, in itself, was no stranger than those very adventures, after all) and that the letter really was meant for him, what were the odds of it actually finding him? Sure, Hector would’ve probably known that his English teacher kept all these assignments and that someone, someday, might come across it. Might. That was assuming someone didn’t just throw out the entire box without looking through it, which would’ve made more sense than going to the trouble of sorting through it all, in Eric’s opinion. But it wasn’t as if Gawes, himself had sought him out to deliver the letter. He’d happened to befriend a former student, who, like Eric, wasn’t even born when the letter was written. If Chad hadn’t been in Gawes’ class, or if the two of them hadn’t both been members of the Creek Bend Historical Society, or if Chad and Eric had not been friends, or if either of them had done something different with their lives than choosing to teach at the same high school, it never would’ve found him. Chad probably would’ve tossed the letter in the trash without another thought. For that matter, what if Mrs. Gawes hadn’t entrusted her late husband’s intellectual estate to Chad? Or even if Eric had not been free to help him on this particular day? I THINK YOU’RE OVERTHINKING IT, said Isabelle. The phone was resting in the PT Cruiser’s cup holder, where he could see the screen. “Am I?”HE SAID IN THE LETTER THAT HE SAW IT FINDING YOU IN HIS DREAMS. HE SAW THAT IF HE TURNED THE LETTER IN AS AN ASSIGNMENT, THAT YOU’D ONE DAY READ ITThat was true, he supposed…NOTHING THAT CAME BETWEEN MATTERED. ALL HE NEEDED TO KNOW WAS THAT YOU’D READ IT IF HE GAVE IT TO MR. GAWES“It just seems a little convoluted to me.”YOU WERE CHOSEN TO HAVE THE DREAMS YOU HAD, she reminded him. YOU WERE CHOSEN FOR ALL THE AMAZING THINGS YOU’VE DONE. WHY COULDN’T YOU BE CHOSEN TO FIND HECTOR’S LETTER?“You’re right.”OF COURSE I AMEric frowned at the screen. “You’ve been spending too much time talking to Karen.”THAT DOESN’T CHANGE THE FACT THAT I’M RIGHTNo, it certainly didn’t. But it was still annoying.
Chapter Two
Karen was in the kitchen, as usual. A half-dozen strawberry pies were cooling on the countertop (her modest contribution to the big bake sale at the library tomorrow morning) and she was tidying up after herself. She was understandably surprised to see him.“Home already?” she asked.Eric walked past the kitchen and into the hallway. “Only for a minute,” he replied. He opened the closet door and began rummaging inside. Karen leaned against the doorway and watched him. “Is this one of those surprise inspections to try and catch me and my illicit lover red handed? Because he usually hides under the bed.”“That’s right, I always forget he can fit under there. Where’re the garden tools?”“In the basement. You going to chase him off with a rake?”Eric closed the closet door and walked back through the kitchen, giving her a quick kiss on the cheek as he squeezed past her. “I need a shovel.”“Now you’re just getting ahead of yourself.” “Well, I do like to plan ahead.” He opened the basement door and hurried down the steps. Karen’s gardening basket was there in the corner. “You’re acting weird. Is everything okay?” He grabbed a hand trowel and then turned and started up the steps again. “You might want to grab a bigger one,” she told him. “I’m no expert, but I think it’d take a long time to dig a grave with that.” “I only need to make a little hole.” “Ouch. You’re scary good at this jealous husband thing.” She took a step back and let him pass. “I’m not sure whether to be really disturbed or really turned on.” She brushed a loose strand of brown hair away from her lovely face and followed him. “Is it weird that I’m pretty sure I’m leaning toward ‘really turned on’?” Eric placed the trowel on the table and checked his watch. It was almost one o’clock in the afternoon. “Huh?”“Seriously,” she said, taking him by the arm. “You’re starting to freak me out. What’s going on?”He turned and met her gaze. “It’s…um…”Those beautiful, brown eyes narrowed. “Weirdness?” she asked. Eric sighed. “I think so.” He pulled Hector’s letter from his pocket and handed it to her. She unfolded it and read the first line. “Mr. Future?”“Chad found that in one of Mr. Gawes’ boxes. It was written by a sixth grader more than fifty years ago.”Karen began to read. After a moment, she creased her eyebrows and said, “Wait… Is he talking about you?”“About me and to me.”She finished reading the letter and looked up at him again. “Who’s Mr. Silver?”“A clue to tell me where to find another letter.” “And you know who he’s talking about?”“I can’t be positive until I check. But yeah. I think so.”“So you’re just going to run off and do your thing again? Get yourself hurt? Scare me to death?”Eric stood staring at her. “I’m sorry.”She rolled her eyes. “I know you are. You’re always sorry.” She looked down at the letter again. “These are agents, aren’t they?”Not much got by her. She was a very bright woman. And he didn’t keep secrets from her. She knew everything about every one of his adventures, with the sole exception that he sometimes told her that his close calls weren’t as close as they really were. And he was pretty sure he wasn’t even fooling her about that. “What does Isabelle say about this?”“She says I have to look into it. She doesn’t believe in coincidences.”“And neither do I.” She read through the letter again and then handed it back to him. “I’m coming with you this time.”He thought for a second that he must’ve misheard her. “What? No. Absolutely not.”But he might as well have been talking gibberish, because she ignored him and hurried off to put on her shoes. He called after her: “I’m serious. It might be dangerous.”“You said yourself that letter is over fifty years old,” she called back from the hallway. “What could possibly be dangerous about it?”Eric looked down at the letter again. He had a very vivid imagination. He’d always had a very vivid imagination. And he could think of a lot of things that might be dangerous about it. There were agents involved. Those guys were always bad news. For all he knew, they might still be alive and lurking around. He doubted if elderly agents would be any less dangerous than young ones. Or for all he knew, some agents might not even age. He’d met a man just a few weeks ago who claimed to have been alive for several hundred years. “These things always turn out to be a lot more than they first appear.”“We’re just looking for a second letter,” she reasoned. She wasn’t backing down, so he changed his strategy to one that never failed. “You have too much to do,” he argued. She was a freelance cake decorator and caterer, and a damn good one. She made good money off her talents, and they typically kept her busy. Especially on the weekends. But today was going to be different. “I’m already done with everything,” she countered. “The bake sale?”“Done.”“What about that potluck at the church?”“That’s not until Sunday. I won’t even start that until tomorrow.”“Didn’t you have a graduation cake, too?”“Two of them. I delivered both of them this morning.” She walked back into the room and took her cell phone from the charger, then she turned and gave him a quick kiss on his lips. “Bonus points for paying attention to my life, though.”“I don’t want bonus points,” huffed Eric as she hurried out of the room to grab her purse. “I want you to stay home where it’s safe.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket and said, “Tell her she needs to stay home where it’s safe.”I’M NOT THE BOSS OF HER, replied Isabelle.“Isabelle agrees with me,” said Eric. HEY!But Karen didn’t seem to be listening. “So do you think this Hector kid is like you? Your stuff started with dreams, too.”“Yeah, but I didn’t dream about things that wouldn’t happen for fifty years.”She walked back into the room, already slipping her sunglasses onto her face. Her hair was tied back now. It was amazing how good she managed to look in something as simple as a pair of khaki shorts and a scoop neck tee shirt. “No, but you dreamed about things that would happen in the next few hours. Sort of…”Eric gave his head one of those wobbles that wasn’t quite a yes or a no. The first time the weirdness crashed into his life, it started with a dream that woke him in the middle of the night with a pressing urge to get up and leave. But he couldn’t remember what the dream was about, so he ignored it. After three nights of this, he gave in to the compulsion and took a drive. What followed was a terrifying trek through a monster-infested fissure between two worlds. It turned out that the dream was showing him the things he would see and do, but only as they would’ve happened if he’d left the first time he awoke. By leaving two days later, things had changed. So technically, that had been a dream about the future. It just wasn’t the future that actually came to be. And it had only revealed a few hours to him, less than a single day, not even close to Hector’s fifty-four years.“Maybe he had adventures like you do,” suggested Karen. “Maybe,” said Eric. “It’s really interesting.” She picked up the trowel and handed it to him. “I want to see what you dig up.”“I always keep you posted,” he reminded her. “This time you won’t have to. And, I can keep an eye on you. Make sure you don’t go visiting any strip clubs.”Eric groaned. “One time! I didn’t even want to be there! Isabelle even told you I didn’t want to be there!”But she’d already turned and was on her way out the door. Eric followed after her. “I’m serious. This kid mentioned agents, remember? Those guys are bad news.”“Those guys are probably collecting social security by now. If they even live that long. It’s got to be a hazardous line of work. You killed three of them yourself.”Eric glanced around, startled. “Can we not talk about that outside?”Karen opened the passenger door of the silver PT Cruiser and climbed inside. “Sorry, killer.”“Seriously?” He sat behind the wheel and slammed the door. “And I didn’t kill any of them. I just…didn’t save them…”“What does it matter? They all had it coming.”“Did they?” asked Eric. She lowered her sunglasses and met his eyes. “You never had a choice. Not even in Illinois. You did what you had to do every time.”He shook his head and started the engine. She was right about the rest of them. The foggy man in Minnesota, the two agents here in Creek Bend last year, even the psychotic and inhuman Jonah Fettarsetter in Michigan…all of them had been cold-blooded killers with deadly agendas. He had no choice but to stop them. But the girl in Illinois was different… He was sure there was another way. He just wasn’t wise enough to find it.Karen didn’t say anything else about it. She knew it bothered him how those encounters went down. Instead, she pushed her sunglasses back into place and said, “So where’re we going?” Eric began backing out of the driveway. He wasn’t going to win this one. He’d known that from the start. She was coming with him whether he liked it or not. Few forces on this planet were as powerful as his wife’s stubbornness. “Boxlar Road,” he replied. “To see Mr. Silver.”
Don't miss what happens next! Rushed: A Matter of Time goes on sale Christmas Eve. Preorder your copy now at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B018....
June 30, 2015
Writing with Baby
If you follow me on Facebook, you probably already know that I was blessed with a new arrival earlier this year. I’m now a father of three. As a result, I’ve had a serious, but I hope perfectly understandable impediment to my writing. It’s not nearly as easy as it once was to find time to work on my next book, and my progress has slowed down noticeably. Often times, I’ve no more than just found my word flow when Dad is needed again. There’s a diaper emergency. Or the other two kids are fighting. Or someone desperately needs a snack right now, even though mom is feeding the baby. Or someone has their head stuck between the stairs railings. Again. Every day is a new adventure. And a new opportunity to find yourself saying something you never thought you’d hear yourself say. Like, “We don’t put deodorant on the cat,” and, “Because you’re not a licensed dentist! That’s why!” There’s no preparing for this stuff. You just have to wing it.
Regardless of how crazy it gets, I’d never give up this life for anything. Even now that my work is earning enough that my wife was able to cut back her work hours, I refuse to entirely give up my status as “stay-at-home dad.” I’m far too proud of that title to let it go.
I truly have the best two jobs in the world. I have the best kids and the best fans! And I promise you many more dark adventures are on the way. I’m just moving a little slower than usual right now. Thank you so much for reading!
Regardless of how crazy it gets, I’d never give up this life for anything. Even now that my work is earning enough that my wife was able to cut back her work hours, I refuse to entirely give up my status as “stay-at-home dad.” I’m far too proud of that title to let it go.
I truly have the best two jobs in the world. I have the best kids and the best fans! And I promise you many more dark adventures are on the way. I’m just moving a little slower than usual right now. Thank you so much for reading!
May 19, 2015
Sneak Peek: Hands of the Architects, book 1
Hands of the Architects is a brand new, dark adventure trilogy that should delight fans of both Rushed and The Temple of the Blind. Book one, Spirit Ears and Prophet Sight, will be available for sale on August 4, but you can preorder it right now on Amazon.
Persephone can see things others can't, like those ghostly ears atop Piper's head. Piper can hear things no one else can, like the eerie whispering that preludes the arrival of the murderous wraiths that will hunt them to the ends of the earth. Their only hope is to obtain an ancient and powerful artifact that has been hidden since the creation of the universe.
Read on for a sneak peek of the first two chapters.
Chapter 1
Persephone Kipp hadn’t slept well the past two nights. She kept having strange dreams. They weren’t nightmares, exactly, although there were some nightmare elements strewn throughout the overall chaos that rolled through her mind like a violent storm each time she managed to nod off. More than once she’d found herself running from some horrible, murderous thing that she couldn’t quite see. And there was a particularly frightening bit about being lost in an endless darkness. But mostly the dreams were just strange and meaningless and disturbing in a way that intruded upon her waking life. It was taking a toll on her, leaving her weary and distracted. And today was the worst possible day for her to be off her game. “Earth to Seph. Hello? Do you copy?”She blinked and sat up. “Huh?”Phoenix laughed. She had an annoying laugh. It was nasally, and sort of shrill. Today it was almost painful to hear. “Better snap out of it fast,” she advised, checking her watch. Persephone took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “I’m trying,” she said. “She can’t help it,” said Alton. “She’s exhausted from celebrating all weekend.”“Seph doesn’t celebrate anything that hard,” countered Kaitlyn, brushing aside her pink-streaked hair to give her an admonishing look. “No matter how hard I try to talk her into it.” Alton chuckled and leaned back in his chair. His naturally dark hair had streaks of blond so bright they were practically yellow. It was long and unkempt in a way that required a considerable amount of work in the mornings to look just that way. Phoenix laughed that annoying laugh again. Her hair was a more subtle purple, but shaved on one side, better to show off her many earrings and the stream of tattoos that started behind her left ear and ran down the side her of her neck. Persephone was the only one at the table who preferred her hair to remain natural. She liked it just the way she grew it, raven black and fine, cut shoulder-length and simple.“I’d love to see Seph celebrate that hard,” said Phoenix. Almost everyone called her “Seph.” It was much less of a mouthful than “Persephone,” which she’d hated for most of her childhood. Teachers rarely pronounced it right. Kids with normal, simple names like “Ellen” and “Julie” made fun of her. But by the time she started college, she’d made peace with it, and by the time she’d earned her bachelor’s degree, she’d learned to love it. She found that she enjoyed having a name that made her different from all the boring Ellens and Julies out there. She checked her watch. It was almost time to leave. And two espressos hadn’t helped her to find her focus at all. “It’s a big deal,” said Alton. “I’d be too excited to sleep, too.”It was a big deal. It was her big opportunity. A job interview with the area’s leading graphic design company. It was what she’d worked so hard for. It was what she wanted to do with her life. And it all came down to this interview. Well…not just this interview. It was only the first of three. She’d have to make a very good impression today just to get a second one. But you only got one first interview. And if she blew it today… She drained the last of her espresso and forced herself to focus on the menu board. She was so nervous. “You’ll do great,” promised Kaitlyn. “Relax.” Seph gave her a tired smile. “Of course she’ll do great,” agreed Phoenix. She met Phoenix Carasik, Kaitlyn Jernam, and Alton Ripna in the art department during her first semester of college. They’d all just kind of clicked, as they said. And they’d remained friends ever since. She didn’t see them as much now that they’d all graduated and gone their separate ways, but they managed to get together every couple of months. Mostly thanks to Kaitlyn, who seemed to have made it her personal crusade to prevent them from ever drifting completely apart. “It’s the same thing she always does,” declared Alton as he fingered the silver ring in his left eyebrow. Both of his eyebrows were pierced, as was his nose and lip. And he was always touching them. He couldn’t seem to help himself. “She can’t just do something great and show the rest of us up. She has to do it sleep deprived and jacked up on coffee, just to rub it in that much more.” “She does!” giggled Kaitlyn. She leaned forward and poked her tongue ring out between her teeth. “I don’t show anyone up,” returned Seph, looking down at her cup. She hated when Kaitlyn played with that thing. It was even more annoying than Alton fiddling with the ones on his face. All three of them had piercings. Kaitlyn’s tongue and eyebrow. Phoenix’s lip and nose. It was their thing, apparently. Seph, however, didn’t have anything pierced but her ears. She had four in each ear, two at the top and two at the bottom, but that was all. And she didn’t have any tattoos, either. She liked her body like she liked her hair: Natural. “You always show me up,” argued Alton. “Anything I can do, you can do better, and during some kind of personal crisis.”Seph wrinkled her nose at him. “That’s not true.” “Of course it is,” he insisted. “You could catch ebola and still give the best damn interview.”Seph gave a snort of a laugh. Phoenix sat back in her seat, smiling broadly. “I’ll bet I know what it is,” she declared, her violet-lensed eyes widening with mischievous delight. “She says she hasn’t been sleeping well, but she hasn’t said whose bed she hasn’t been sleeping in.”Seph shot her an unamused look over her cup, which only managed to make her break out into that annoying, nasally laugh again. Phoenix had a morbid fascination with the scandalous. Nothing pleased her more than the idea of people caught up in sordid mischief, especially sexual mischief. Alton rolled his eyes. “I’m just saying,” pressed Phoenix. “The girl’s not getting any younger. She should get herself some action.”“She’s twenty-three,” said Alton. “I think she’s still got time.”“Seph’s a good girl,” said Kaitlyn, managing somehow to make it sound like both a defense and a reproach. “Not like someone else I know.” Phoenix bit her lip and made an exaggerated “who me?” face. Seph stood up. “Anyway… I’m not going to even make it to my interview if I don’t get going. I have to leave time for traffic.” “I’ve got to go, too,” announced Alton, rising to his feet.Phoenix shrugged. “Fine. Me, too.”“This was fun!” said Kaitlyn. “We’ll do it again.”Everyone agreed that it was and they would. They gathered their jackets and purses. (Alton insisted his was a satchel, but Seph knew a man purse when she saw one.)“I’ll talk to you guys later,” said Seph as her friends headed for the door. “I have to get something to go.” She waved goodbye and then walked over to the counter and ordered an Americano. The barista was a tall, dark-haired young man who looked a couple years younger than her. Sort of attractive, but also sort of average, with the kind of everyday face that would be hard to pick out of a crowd ten minutes from now. She barely spared him a glance as he rang up her order and took her money. It was as he was handing her back his change that things first turned weird. She glanced up at his face as she thanked him, actually looking at him for the first time. There, on the very top of his head, two strange, hazy shapes protruded from his thick hair. He turned away and set about making her drink, but Seph had forgotten about the Americano. She even forgot about the interview. It took all her weary mind could manage just to try to process what it was she was seeing. It looked like one of those stupid cat-ear headbands, like the ones you see everywhere on Halloween. But these weren’t made of plastic and fake fur. They appeared to be made of a strange, luminescent, gray mist. He caught her staring at him and stopped. “Is something wrong?”Seph blinked. “What?”“Are you okay?”She glanced around the room. No one else had strange, ghostly ears sprouting from their head. And no one else seemed to have noticed the ones on the barista. No one was staring at him like she was. A few people, however, were staring at her. “No…” she said, blushing. “I mean, yes. I’m fine. I just…” Her eyes fixed on those ears again. They looked a little bit like fox ears, tall and triangular, pointy, but not as big in proportion to the head as a real fox’s ears. As she watched, one of them twitched to the side and then back again. And yet they weren’t really there. They couldn’t be. She could see through them. They were faint around the edges, as if made of smoke. “Can I get you anything else?” asked the confused barista who clearly didn’t realize that he’d sprouted an extra pair of ears. Seph had to make a conscious effort to compose herself. “No. I’m fine.” Then, lamely, she said, “I haven’t been sleeping well. I’m sorry.”He assured her that it was no problem and went back to work, but those strange ears seemed to rotate toward her as he turned away, as if watching her. (Listening to her?)Needing to find something to focus on besides the top of the barista’s head, she opened her purse and dug out her keys. When she looked up again, the ears hadn’t gone away and still no one seemed to have noticed them. She looked to see if any of her friends were still in the shop, but they’d all three left by now.Another customer approached the counter, an older woman with a prim look about her, and Seph stepped out of the way. This woman looked right at the barista as he assured her that he’d be right with her, and yet she completely ignored the perky, transparent ears, even though they were plainly visible and even appeared to be faintly glowing. Was this some kind of elaborate prank? Was she on camera? Was this guy one of those street magicians or something? Even that didn’t make sense. How would you pull off an illusion like this? The ears—or whatever they were—moved with his head, remaining in place even as he moved about behind the counter. It looked far too perfect to be any kind of holographic manipulation. Finally, her Americano came up. She took it, thanked him and then quickly walked out of the coffee shop, somehow resisting the urge to break into a run. She slipped behind the wheel of her truck (a full-sized Ford pickup; she might be small at only five-foot-three, but she was formidable enough on the highway) and sat there for a moment, her eyes closed, trying to make sense of what she’d seen. It couldn’t have been real. It was too ridiculous to be real. Clearly she’d imagined the whole thing. She hadn’t slept well the past two nights. She’d tossed and turned. She’d dreamed those strange dreams. Obviously, she was even more sleep-deprived than she thought. She was hallucinating. She took off her glasses again and rubbed at her weary eyes. She might’ve laughed, if she wasn’t so worried about the interview. She still had to drive all the way to Cakwetak, which was practically Milwaukee. Once there, she’d have to find a way to not look like a total mess in front of the human resources director. Returning the glasses to her face, she looked out across the parking lot. She could see several people walking around. None of them had spectral ears sprouting from their heads. She’d be all right. It was the stress, she realized. She was so worried about this interview. Once it was over, maybe she’d be able to sleep again. She pulled out of the parking lot and headed east.
* * *
The interview went well enough, she supposed. She didn’t start hallucinating any animal parts on the human resources director and make a complete fool of herself, at least. She thought she responded with all the right answers. But she kept thinking that she looked terrible. She felt twitchy, wired, probably from too much caffeine. No matter how hard she tried to forget the strange incident at the coffee shop, her mind kept returning to it. “He thought I was on drugs,” she said. “I know it.” “Will you just relax already?” sighed Amethyst. “You did fine.” Amethyst Wilhoit was Seph’s roommate. They were paired together by chance their sophomore year in the dorm and hit it off much better than did Seph and her freshman roommate. (That girl had some serious baggage.) Now they shared an apartment close to the campus, where Amethyst had moved on to graduate studies.She was tall and slender, shapely, with long, wavy, brown hair and soft features. She had a lovely face, except for a faint, wide scar beneath her left eye, a remnant of a nasty fall when she was just a girl. She was utterly convinced that this blemish was an insurmountable flaw, but Seph thought it gave her a unique kind of character. And it’d never deterred the boys from flocking to her. In fact, it was impossible to tell if any man had ever even noticed the scar. Their eyes didn’t usually go that far up. They never made it past her huge breasts.They were sitting at a table at a little café just a couple blocks from their apartment, waiting on their lunch. The place had become a favorite for both of them almost as soon as they moved in. It was quiet, cozy, within walking distance and the food was tasty and reasonably priced. Seph groaned. “I totally blew it.”“Stop it,” said Amethyst. “It’s only been two days. They probably haven’t even finished interviewing the other applicants yet.”This was probably true, and yet Seph couldn’t help it. She was sure she’d botched it. And it wasn’t even her fault. It was those dreams. The restless nights. That bizarre hallucination at the coffee shop. “You couldn’t fail,” Amethyst assured her. “I was sending you good energy all day.”“I told you I don’t believe in that stuff.”“You don’t have to.” She took a sip of her tea and stared across the table at her. Seph didn’t bother arguing with her. There wasn’t any point in it. Amethyst was an unwavering believer in the power of positive energy. She was utterly convinced that people could affect the world around them with little more than a sickening dose of cheerful optimism. Okay…so there was a little more to it than that. Amethyst believed in karma and in the idea that what you fed into the universe determined the quality of your life. She believed in positive and negative emotional energy, which could somehow be used to affect those around her. And which could be measured by examining a person’s aura. Apparently. Amethyst, who meditated daily and adhered to a strictly vegan diet, supposedly possessed a very clean aura. Seph, who did neither of those things, was burdened by a “muddy” aura. Or so Amethyst had informed her. Seph’s personal opinion of the matter was that the only thing making anything “muddy” was the large quantity of bullshit, but she was polite enough not to say so. “I’m right. You’ll see.”Seph stared out the window at nothing in particular. “If you say so.” She was too tired to argue about this right now. She slept a little better after the interview, but only a little. She was still plagued by those weird dreams, still tossing and turning. Last night was a little better still. It seemed to finally be going away, but the damage had been done. If she’d blown this interview, she was going to be sorely disappointed in herself. “You’re totally going to get that second interview. Just wait.” Seph sipped her Coke and let her gaze drift across the room. Just wait. She hated the waiting. The waiting was the worst part. It could be another two weeks or more before she heard back, regardless of their decision. And if she didn’t start getting more sleep soon, it was going to be a very long wait. She needed this job. All through college, she’d lived on her student loans and the moderately sizeable bank account that her father left her. The money would sustain her comfortably for a few more years, even after paying back the loans, but it wouldn’t last forever. If she didn’t want to end up flat broke she was going to have to find a job with some kind of future. This might be her one chance to do what she wanted with her life, instead of laboring away in some bleak factory somewhere. But then something caught her attention that made her forget about the interview. A television was on in the corner of the room. There was a news story. A picture of a familiar face. A sort of average face. The kind of face that was kind of attractive, but easily forgotten. Except she hadn’t forgotten the barista’s face at all. She could still picture him clearly in her mind. And although she couldn’t see any ghostly animal ears on the young man whose face was on the television, it was clearly him. The headline announced that a body had been identified. “What’s that about?”Amethyst turned around, confused, and looked at the television. “Oh… You didn’t hear about that? It was awful. It was all over the news this morning.”“I was trying to sleep in.”“They found that guy in the middle of an empty parking lot. His body was all…broken.” A look of revulsion passed over her face as she recalled the gruesome details of the report. “I guess nobody saw anything, not even on security cameras. It was like he just dropped out of the sky. Super creepy.”Seph stared at the screen, horrified. “I just saw that guy…” she breathed. Amethyst’s eyes grew wide. “You knew him?”She shook her head. “No. I just…saw him. He was a barista at this coffee shop where I was meeting some friends. I’d never seen him before then.”Amethyst shuddered. “That’s creepy.”Creepy wasn’t the half of it. She stared at the guy’s picture. His name was Coby Bilk, according to the caption on the screen. But she never got his name. She never looked at his nametag. She was too busy staring at his ghostly ears. That this guy, of all guys, should turn up dead… What did it mean? The news story switched over to something else and Seph lowered her eyes as the waitress appeared with her plate. Suddenly, she’d lost her appetite. She decided to get her chicken salad to go.
* * *
Seph didn’t sleep very well again that night. She had nightmares about Coby Bilk and his strange, ghostly ears. It was late at night and even darker than it should’ve been. The streetlights were all out. Nobody was around. He was running for his life, screaming, begging for help. But she didn’t know how to help him. The next night was a little better. And the next night was better still. By the end of the weekend, she was feeling much more like her old self again. Better still, she was offered a second interview for the graphic design job, scheduled for Thursday afternoon. She dismissed her curious hallucination as a side-effect of stress and lack of sleep and even managed to push from her mind the strange coincidence of the barista’s terrible death. It helped that the news story had been brushed aside in favor of an even more awful story about some kind of freak accident at a manufacturing facility in Sewart, Wisconsin. Thirty-seven people were dead. And it seemed as though no one could explain exactly how or why this tragedy happened. There were too many conflicting and confusing reports. It might have been either a disgruntled employee, a terrorist attack or some kind of insane viral outbreak, among other bizarre theories. She’d stopped paying attention to the reports. It was too disturbing. As sorry as she was to hear about all the victims and their poor families, there simply wasn’t anything she could do about it. She had her own life to lead and she needed to stay focused. And she did stay focused. She was well-prepared and much more confident for her second interview. By the time she left, she was quite proud of herself. In all, it was a good day for her. She walked out of the building with her head held high, confident this time that she’d be asked back for the third and final interview. But as she walked to her truck, she looked out across the busy street and glimpsed a middle-aged man pushing his way through the crowd as if in a hurry, a cell phone pressed to his ear, wearing a suit jacket and tie. He looked just like any other self-absorbed, inconsiderate jerk, except for the ghostly, glowing ears protruding from his graying hair. Seph stopped and stood there, her car keys dangling from her hand, staring. He didn’t see her looking at him. He didn’t seem to see anyone. He practically knocked an old woman over in his rush. He appeared to be having a heated conversation with whoever was on the other end of the line. People saw him perfectly fine. They gave him dirty looks as he passed. But none of them stared at him in any way that would suggest that they saw glowing animal ears sprouting from his head. She watched him walk, trying to blink away whatever it was that was making her eyes hallucinate this strange vision again, but they wouldn’t go. The ears stubbornly refused to disappear, no matter how hard she tried to look past them. They looked different from the ears she’d seen on Coby Bilk. They were more round than pointy. More like a bear’s ears, perhaps, although it was difficult to tell from this distance. Then the man turned the corner and was gone. Seph looked around. No one else had ghostly animal ears. Everyone else looked perfectly normal. She stood there a moment, confused, and then continued on toward her car.
* * *
Seph was nervous for the next couple days. Partly because she was waiting to hear back about the interview, but also because she couldn’t stop thinking of those two, bizarre hallucinations. What did it mean? Why was it happening to her?She was beginning to fear that she was having some manner of mental breakdown. And this was a lousy time to have one of those. She was so close to achieving her career goal. It had to be the stress. She was so worried about this interview process. It must have been messing with her head. And as the weekend came and went, that seemed to be precisely the case. The world went on about its business as she waited to hear back about the job. She went out several times. She even went to the mall and had lunch with her mother, who wanted to hear all about her interviews. She saw hundreds of people. Thousands, perhaps, and not one of them had a pair of weird, ghostly ears sprouting from their skulls. She didn’t tell her mom about her hallucinations, of course. She didn’t tell anyone. She didn’t want anyone to know how badly her mind had unraveled itself. It was no one else’s business. Then Wednesday evening came around and Seph found herself sitting in front of the television, staring at another familiar face on the screen. Baxter Winger had turned up dead alongside Interstate Ninety-Four, his mangled body left within plain sight of traffic, and yet there were no witnesses. She stared at his picture, her stomach twisting into a hot, slimy knot inside her. He didn’t have animal ears in the picture, ghostly or otherwise, but she recognized him immediately as the rude man on the far side of the street in Cakwetak. It had happened again. Twice she’d seen those strange ears and twice the person had ended up dead. And violently so. What was going on? Why was this happening? Were the ears some sort of death omen? And if so, why was she the only one who could see them? What the hell was she supposed to do about something like that? It wasn’t as if she could tell anyone. They’d tell her she was crazy. She’d tell her she was crazy. It was ridiculous! She tried to make sense of it. She must be mistaken. Maybe these weren’t the same people at all. Maybe she was only projecting the faces of these dead men onto her memory of those people her stressed brain decided to fool her into thinking had those stupid, phantom ears. That had to be it. It didn’t make much sense, but that was the only possible explanation. She turned off the television and went to bed. But she didn’t sleep well again that night.
* * *
Seph was offered her third and final interview. It was on Thursday, the sixth of November, about a week after Baxter Winger was reported dead, at one o’clock in the afternoon.Overall, she was confident. She hadn’t had any more hallucinations to rattle her, and she’d been avoiding the news, just to be certain nothing else would distract her, so she felt well-composed and perfectly professional. She was even running early that morning, arriving in Cakwetak with plenty of time to spare, so she stopped at a drive-through and treated herself to a pumpkin spice latte. That was when her luck turned sour. As soon as she pulled out onto the main road again, she was cut off by a moving truck that changed lanes without signaling. She slammed on the Ford’s brakes and swerved, narrowly avoiding a collision and spilling the latte on her good dress pants. She cursed at the other driver—and at the scalding pain of the hot beverage soaking into her pants leg—and merged into traffic. This was going to be a problem. She couldn’t possibly expect to be taken seriously if she showed up for this important interview in stained clothes, but it wasn’t as if she’d thought to bring a spare outfit. She did her best to mop up the spill with a napkin, but the stain wasn’t coming out. And it wasn’t subtle, either. It was huge. She groaned, frustrated, and checked the time. She was still early. There was time to fix this. She changed lanes and turned at the next intersection instead of going straight. The Cakwetak shopping mall was directly ahead. If she was quick, she could pop in, get a new pair of pants, change and then be on her way again. It might be cutting it close, but she was certain she could pull it off if there weren’t any more unexpected complications. She parked near the bookstore and started inside, resisting the impatient urge to pick up her pace beyond a brisk walk. It felt like a mile to the nearest apparel store, but she still had time. She didn’t need to run. Or even jog. There was no good reason to tire herself out and show up to the interview looking like she’d just left the gym. But that bad luck was still with her. As she was riding up the escalator to the second floor, gazing down at the storefronts below her, it happened again. A young woman emerged from the Bath and Body Works and set off toward the food court. She was slender and pretty, wearing skinny jeans, stylish boots and a yellow, long-sleeve shirt. She had a playful, blonde ponytail and a pair of ghostly, glowing ears protruding from her head just above the neat line of her bangs. Seph’s heart instantly sank. No. She couldn’t deal with this right now. She didn’t have time. But the last two people she saw with those ears had turned up dead, and violently so. How long would it be before this blonde girl turned up on the news as well, her body brutally mangled?She couldn’t let it happen again. She’d never have a good night’s sleep again if she had to deal with that kind of guilt. But what was she supposed to do? Just forget about her interview? Throw away all that she’d worked for? This was her dream. This was her chance to do what she wanted with her life. Besides, she couldn’t just walk up to this girl and say, “Excuse me, but do you realize that you have a pair of phantom animal ears stuck to your head? No? Well it’s no surprise since I’m the only one who seems to be able to see them. The problem is that I’m pretty sure you’re going to die horribly sometime soon.” The only thing the poor girl would be afraid of would be the crazy, bespectacled weirdo with stained pants who approached her in the middle of a crowded mall to tell her this. No. That wouldn’t do at all. In fact, she couldn’t think of a single thing she could possibly say or do to convince the ponytailed blonde that her life might be in danger without sounding like a complete mental case. It wasn’t an ideal situation by any means. It was downright unfair. But there simply wasn’t anything she could do. It wasn’t her duty to protect these people. She wasn’t responsible for them. She didn’t even believe in this kind of stuff. And she had important things to do today. Seph reached the top of the escalator and walked away from the doomed blonde.
Chapter 2
Piper Holleworth had a lot of nicknames. She wasn’t sure why. People just seemed to decide for whatever reason that she needed to be called something different than what she’d been named, as if "Piper" were too long or cumbersome, or simply wasn’t the right fit for her. Almost nobody called her Piper. Various people called her Pipe, Pipes, Pip, Pippy, Pips, Pipey, Peeps or sometimes just Pi. Her childhood best friend, Wanda Janger, for reasons utterly unbeknownst to anyone except Wanda because she refused to explain it to anybody, called her Babs. And when she was nine, she had a little cousin who took to calling her Peepee, which was mortifying to Piper, but apparently uproariously hilarious to every other member of her family. She still couldn’t attend a holiday gathering without her uncle bellowing, “Peepee’s here!” the moment he caught sight of her. Piper preferred to be Piper. That was her name, exactly as it appeared on her birth certificate, exactly as her mother had intended, and exactly as it was printed on her Bath and Body Works nametag as she left for lunch that peculiar Thursday afternoon. The day hadn’t been peculiar up until this point. In fact, it’d been a perfectly normal morning, even rather pleasant. It didn’t become weird until she made a detour to use the restroom at the end of the rental lockers hallway. It wasn’t even unusual for her to use this restroom. She couldn’t count the times she’d made this exact same stop on her way to lunch. The food court was at the far end of the mall, and the restrooms near there naturally tended to be busy this time of day. It was almost always much better to use this one. Today, she had it entirely to herself. Or she thought she did. As she was washing her hands, and while she was checking her makeup in the mirror, she glimpsed something moving beneath one of the stall doors. At first, she thought it was a shoe, but the stall door was cracked open, as if empty. This made no sense, of course, because who used a public restroom and left the stall open? Didn’t that defeat the purpose of even having a stall? She stared into the mirror as she finished scrubbing her hands, watching for it to appear again, but there was nothing there. She dismissed it as her imagination and moved over to the automatic dryer. The motor was loud enough to drown out most of the surrounding noises, so she didn’t hear anything. But when she glanced up at the mirror again, she saw one of the stall doors—a different stall this time—swing slowly closed. Piper stopped and turned around, her slender hands still damp.The hand dryer roared on for a moment longer, then wound to a stop. The silence that followed was heavy. No music played in here. No voices drifted this far from the main floor. She could hear the ventilation system humming faintly. She could hear the soft buzzing of the overhead lights. But other than that, the only sound was the thumping of her heart in her breast and the rush of blood in her ears. She could see no one from where she stood. The restroom still seemed to be empty. Was it only a breeze that nudged the door? Was that first shadow she glimpsed only a loose strand of tissue gently tossed around by a draft from the heating vents? She’d been working at one store or another at this mall for the better part of six years and had used this very restroom more times than she could recall. She’d never had any reason to feel spooked before. Not here. But now her heart was pounding. Her reflection in the mirrors stared back at her with startled eyes. A frightful panic was building inside her. She took a deep breath and willed herself to calm down. Nothing was happening. It was her imagination. It wouldn’t be the first time it got the better of her. As a little girl, she’d frequently frightened herself. She was always convinced that there was something hiding under her bed or in her closet or else lurking just outside her window. She’d run her poor father ragged every night, peering into all the places a boogeyman might be able to fit, sometimes places no one else ever thought to look. But that was a long time ago. Well…not that long ago. She was only twenty-four. But she’d grown up. She wasn’t afraid of the dark anymore. She didn’t believe in monsters. It was just…nerves, perhaps. Too much caffeine. Or maybe she hadn’t been getting quite enough sleep. She needed to stop staying up so late reading those paranormal romances, but she couldn’t help herself. She was addicted, and had been since she was thirteen. Her cell phone buzzed in her purse, startling her as it alerted her to a new text message. Embarrassed by her own silliness, she fished it out and glanced at the screen. It was Meg again. As far as roommates went, Meg wasn’t the worst. She and Piper shared a dorm room their first three years of college, and had since upgraded to an apartment. They got along fine. She cleaned up after herself and did her share of the chores. Even her various boyfriends had all been tolerable. The only problem with Meg was that she was considerably prone to crises. It seemed that every few months her world completely fell apart for one idiotic reason or another. And every time it happened, she could be counted on to behave like a complete lunatic about it. She became brash, impulsive and paranoid. She’d jump to the most ludicrous conclusions. She’d make wild accusations. And she’d almost always end up doing something regrettable. Just last night, her fragile plane of existence was once again shattered when she discovered her laptop had gone missing. Piper wasn’t all that concerned about the laptop. It wasn’t that she didn’t care about Meg’s plight. It was that this was the fourth time she’d misplaced it. It’d always turned up before, usually having been left somewhere stupid. But that hadn’t stopped her from completely flipping out about it. Again. The text message was a rambling, poorly-spelled and far-too-long account of her failed attempts to retrieve her lost property. Her boyfriend, Martin, didn’t have it. Her friends hadn’t seen it. It hadn’t turned up at the library or coffee shop or in any of her classrooms. It seemed to be gone, and she was sure it’d been stolen this time. The contents of the missing laptop included three term papers and one essay due first thing Monday morning, yet she seemed far more concerned with her photo album, which contained her only copy of many of the pictures she’d taken throughout her college years. (Why these things weren’t properly backed up after having experienced this very same crisis three times previously was unconceivable to Piper, but here she was again.) She patiently responded that the last time she’d seen it was the day before yesterday, when she was using Facebook to procrastinate on her homework, and wished her good luck in her search. As she slipped the phone back into her purse, she heard a distinct “clunk” from one of the stalls in front of her and she froze. That stubborn, childhood fear crept through her again, driving dark things from the long-buried depths of her imagination. Seconds ticked by as she stood there, listening, waiting. The noise didn’t come again. And she still seemed to be alone in the room, and yet it seemed to her that she could hear something else. It was a low, drawn-out murmuring…almost whispering… But she couldn’t tell where it was coming from. Maybe it was the plumbing making noise. It was, after all, a very big building, with no-telling how many miles of pipes running through the walls and ceilings, feeding toilets, sinks, water fountains and kitchens. A single broken fixture could affect the water pressure and make noise up and down the line, she was sure. That was probably it. She scolded herself for being so ridiculous and turned back to the mirror. She checked to make sure her makeup and hair were still as they should be (and also that she didn’t look exactly like someone who’d just had a strange, mini-freakout for no apparent reason in the restroom). But before she could turn and walk away, she saw a strange, black shape dart over the top of one of the stall walls behind her, out of one and into another. It happened so quickly she couldn’t possibly perceive what it looked like. It was little more than an inky, black shadow. As if to assert that it had not been her imagination, the door of the stall into which the shadowy thing had just dropped suddenly slammed shut, startling from her a shrill scream. She turned and faced the stalls again, her heart pounding harder than ever. “Is someone there?” she called. Nothing answered her, of course. Why would it? What would a scary, black shadow-thing say? But she could still hear that eerie whispering noise. It seemed to float on the air, like a faint stench. Her wide, blue eyes flitted toward the door. It was time to leave. But would she be able to? Every horror novel she’d ever read came flooding back to her in a single, blood-curdling instant and her only thought was, Oh god, I’m that pretty, clueless girl who’s body is the first to turn up!In her defense, her first thoughts about things didn’t usually include something about her being pretty. She had a fairly good idea that she was an attractive person. There’d been a seemingly endless line of boys in her life that’d had obnoxious crushes on her. She enjoyed looking pretty. She enjoyed fashion. She liked making her hair cute. She loved shopping for makeup and accessories. But she wasn’t obsessed with those things. Not like she was with her books. Still holding her breath, she started moving toward the door. Slowly. She didn’t want to provoke the thing into attacking her if she could help it. For all she knew, it didn’t yet know that she was even there. Except, of course, for the fact that she’d just asked it if it was there… So, yeah… It knew she was there. And that she knew it was there. Stupid!It was time to go. But before she could move, she heard a terrible gurgling noise from right behind her. With a startled, “Eek!” she turned and almost tripped herself backing away from the sinks as a strange, gooey mass boiled up out of each of the four drains. Strange, tentacle-like shapes were rising from the goo and reaching outward. Some were stretching toward her. Others were intertwining together, converging into a single, larger shape that crawled up the mirror like a fat, misshapen spider. Piper stared at the awful thing, horrified. Strange, shadowy shapes writhed inside it, shades of gray pulling themselves apart from the black, creating patterns that almost looked like human body parts. The whole time, that awful whispering continued. It felt as if it were inside her very head. She didn’t realize she was still backing away until her heel struck the wall. She stood there, too numb with fear to think what to do next, her mind struggling to find a reasonable explanation for what was happening, but she couldn’t think of one. This couldn’t be real. This had to be some kind of bizarre hallucination. Something moved in her peripheral vision and she dared to look away from the thing clinging to the mirror. More of those strange, black tendrils were slithering out from under the stall doors and across the floor, joining with the ones that oozed down over the edges of the sinks, merging into a single entity. It was all one creature, she realized. An awful thing, like nothing she’d ever seen before. Like nothing she’d ever even imagined. Able to pull itself apart and knit itself back together again. It was coming out of the drains, a blob-like thing emerging from the dark, stinking depths of the sewers. Black, pulsing, snake-like tendrils reached across the walls, branching out like veins as the larger shape on the mirror swelled and began to take form. Within seconds, it had become a crouching, menacing figure that was almost man-shaped. This wasn’t happening. It wasn’t real. It couldn’tbe real because things like this didn’t exist. Not in the real world. And yet here it was, perched atop the sinks, clinging to the mirror right before her startled eyes. She stared at it, her terror growing with each frantic thump of her heart. She’d never been so afraid in her entire life. She needed to leave, but she was too scared to move. Those queer shades of gray ran together, forming patterns that looked like bones, and a ghastly face emerged, an impossibly gaping mouth and screaming eyes that were somehow both empty and hungry.It turned its strange head to one side and then the other, as if taking in its surroundings. She told herself again that it wasn’t real…but it was right there…she was looking right at it…The door was only a few feet away. All she had to do was run. Yet her brain wasn’t functioning properly. She couldn’t seem to shift her body into gear. All she could do was stand there, her mouth open in a frozen, silent scream, staring at the horrible image before her. The thing tilted its head and leaned forward, as if studying her. Then it lifted a hand…or at least, something that vaguely resembled a hand. It was impossibly long, skeletal, with sharp, hard angles, but also strangely droopy, like a plastic doll that was half-melted. It seemed to point at her for a moment, as if accusing her. Go!she told herself. Get out of here!Slowly, her back still pressed against the wall, she began to move sideways toward the door. The awful, gaping shape of the thing’s mouth opened even wider, as if in a silent scream, and those creepy, skeleton fingers crept toward her. Overhead, those strange, vein-like tendrils began to ooze downward, closing in around her like the bars of a hellish cage. There was a scream bubbling up from somewhere deep inside her. She could feel it. But somehow, it just wouldn’t come. Her throat wouldn’t open to let it out. She reached out with her hand, reaching toward the doorway beside her, and bumped one of the automatic hand dryers. It roared to life, startling her, and she snatched her hand back a split-second before the creature lashed out at the sudden sound, shattering the dryer’s plastic case. She dropped to the floor, terrified, and let out what she thought would be an ear-splitting scream, but turned out to be nothing more than a shrill squeak.The monster let out an awful groan and slashed at the dryer again. She ducked under its outstretched arm and bolted from the restroom. She ran back down the empty corridor, past the rental lockers to the open space of the mall’s main floor. She filled her lungs to scream for help, determined to do much more than just squeak this time, but when she glanced over her shoulder to see how close the thing was, she found that it wasn’t there. It hadn’t chased her out into the corridor. She was entirely alone. She stopped, her eyes wide, her heart still hammering in her chest. She was practically panting. Where was it? She knew she didn’t imagine it. There were still flecks of shattered plastic on her shoulder, as real as her own skin. She searched the corridor for the slightest motion, the faintest of creeping shadows, but it was utterly silent. There was nothing. Not even that bizarre whispering noise.No. That was no hallucination. She was sure of it. She took a step backward. No one would ever believe her. They’d say she was crazy. She’d be locked up for sure. Then a thought occurred to her: She couldn’t see it because it wasn’t in the corridor anymore. It was behind her. She turned, terrified, to find a black figure standing right there, reaching out for her.
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Persephone can see things others can't, like those ghostly ears atop Piper's head. Piper can hear things no one else can, like the eerie whispering that preludes the arrival of the murderous wraiths that will hunt them to the ends of the earth. Their only hope is to obtain an ancient and powerful artifact that has been hidden since the creation of the universe.
Read on for a sneak peek of the first two chapters.
Chapter 1
Persephone Kipp hadn’t slept well the past two nights. She kept having strange dreams. They weren’t nightmares, exactly, although there were some nightmare elements strewn throughout the overall chaos that rolled through her mind like a violent storm each time she managed to nod off. More than once she’d found herself running from some horrible, murderous thing that she couldn’t quite see. And there was a particularly frightening bit about being lost in an endless darkness. But mostly the dreams were just strange and meaningless and disturbing in a way that intruded upon her waking life. It was taking a toll on her, leaving her weary and distracted. And today was the worst possible day for her to be off her game. “Earth to Seph. Hello? Do you copy?”She blinked and sat up. “Huh?”Phoenix laughed. She had an annoying laugh. It was nasally, and sort of shrill. Today it was almost painful to hear. “Better snap out of it fast,” she advised, checking her watch. Persephone took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “I’m trying,” she said. “She can’t help it,” said Alton. “She’s exhausted from celebrating all weekend.”“Seph doesn’t celebrate anything that hard,” countered Kaitlyn, brushing aside her pink-streaked hair to give her an admonishing look. “No matter how hard I try to talk her into it.” Alton chuckled and leaned back in his chair. His naturally dark hair had streaks of blond so bright they were practically yellow. It was long and unkempt in a way that required a considerable amount of work in the mornings to look just that way. Phoenix laughed that annoying laugh again. Her hair was a more subtle purple, but shaved on one side, better to show off her many earrings and the stream of tattoos that started behind her left ear and ran down the side her of her neck. Persephone was the only one at the table who preferred her hair to remain natural. She liked it just the way she grew it, raven black and fine, cut shoulder-length and simple.“I’d love to see Seph celebrate that hard,” said Phoenix. Almost everyone called her “Seph.” It was much less of a mouthful than “Persephone,” which she’d hated for most of her childhood. Teachers rarely pronounced it right. Kids with normal, simple names like “Ellen” and “Julie” made fun of her. But by the time she started college, she’d made peace with it, and by the time she’d earned her bachelor’s degree, she’d learned to love it. She found that she enjoyed having a name that made her different from all the boring Ellens and Julies out there. She checked her watch. It was almost time to leave. And two espressos hadn’t helped her to find her focus at all. “It’s a big deal,” said Alton. “I’d be too excited to sleep, too.”It was a big deal. It was her big opportunity. A job interview with the area’s leading graphic design company. It was what she’d worked so hard for. It was what she wanted to do with her life. And it all came down to this interview. Well…not just this interview. It was only the first of three. She’d have to make a very good impression today just to get a second one. But you only got one first interview. And if she blew it today… She drained the last of her espresso and forced herself to focus on the menu board. She was so nervous. “You’ll do great,” promised Kaitlyn. “Relax.” Seph gave her a tired smile. “Of course she’ll do great,” agreed Phoenix. She met Phoenix Carasik, Kaitlyn Jernam, and Alton Ripna in the art department during her first semester of college. They’d all just kind of clicked, as they said. And they’d remained friends ever since. She didn’t see them as much now that they’d all graduated and gone their separate ways, but they managed to get together every couple of months. Mostly thanks to Kaitlyn, who seemed to have made it her personal crusade to prevent them from ever drifting completely apart. “It’s the same thing she always does,” declared Alton as he fingered the silver ring in his left eyebrow. Both of his eyebrows were pierced, as was his nose and lip. And he was always touching them. He couldn’t seem to help himself. “She can’t just do something great and show the rest of us up. She has to do it sleep deprived and jacked up on coffee, just to rub it in that much more.” “She does!” giggled Kaitlyn. She leaned forward and poked her tongue ring out between her teeth. “I don’t show anyone up,” returned Seph, looking down at her cup. She hated when Kaitlyn played with that thing. It was even more annoying than Alton fiddling with the ones on his face. All three of them had piercings. Kaitlyn’s tongue and eyebrow. Phoenix’s lip and nose. It was their thing, apparently. Seph, however, didn’t have anything pierced but her ears. She had four in each ear, two at the top and two at the bottom, but that was all. And she didn’t have any tattoos, either. She liked her body like she liked her hair: Natural. “You always show me up,” argued Alton. “Anything I can do, you can do better, and during some kind of personal crisis.”Seph wrinkled her nose at him. “That’s not true.” “Of course it is,” he insisted. “You could catch ebola and still give the best damn interview.”Seph gave a snort of a laugh. Phoenix sat back in her seat, smiling broadly. “I’ll bet I know what it is,” she declared, her violet-lensed eyes widening with mischievous delight. “She says she hasn’t been sleeping well, but she hasn’t said whose bed she hasn’t been sleeping in.”Seph shot her an unamused look over her cup, which only managed to make her break out into that annoying, nasally laugh again. Phoenix had a morbid fascination with the scandalous. Nothing pleased her more than the idea of people caught up in sordid mischief, especially sexual mischief. Alton rolled his eyes. “I’m just saying,” pressed Phoenix. “The girl’s not getting any younger. She should get herself some action.”“She’s twenty-three,” said Alton. “I think she’s still got time.”“Seph’s a good girl,” said Kaitlyn, managing somehow to make it sound like both a defense and a reproach. “Not like someone else I know.” Phoenix bit her lip and made an exaggerated “who me?” face. Seph stood up. “Anyway… I’m not going to even make it to my interview if I don’t get going. I have to leave time for traffic.” “I’ve got to go, too,” announced Alton, rising to his feet.Phoenix shrugged. “Fine. Me, too.”“This was fun!” said Kaitlyn. “We’ll do it again.”Everyone agreed that it was and they would. They gathered their jackets and purses. (Alton insisted his was a satchel, but Seph knew a man purse when she saw one.)“I’ll talk to you guys later,” said Seph as her friends headed for the door. “I have to get something to go.” She waved goodbye and then walked over to the counter and ordered an Americano. The barista was a tall, dark-haired young man who looked a couple years younger than her. Sort of attractive, but also sort of average, with the kind of everyday face that would be hard to pick out of a crowd ten minutes from now. She barely spared him a glance as he rang up her order and took her money. It was as he was handing her back his change that things first turned weird. She glanced up at his face as she thanked him, actually looking at him for the first time. There, on the very top of his head, two strange, hazy shapes protruded from his thick hair. He turned away and set about making her drink, but Seph had forgotten about the Americano. She even forgot about the interview. It took all her weary mind could manage just to try to process what it was she was seeing. It looked like one of those stupid cat-ear headbands, like the ones you see everywhere on Halloween. But these weren’t made of plastic and fake fur. They appeared to be made of a strange, luminescent, gray mist. He caught her staring at him and stopped. “Is something wrong?”Seph blinked. “What?”“Are you okay?”She glanced around the room. No one else had strange, ghostly ears sprouting from their head. And no one else seemed to have noticed the ones on the barista. No one was staring at him like she was. A few people, however, were staring at her. “No…” she said, blushing. “I mean, yes. I’m fine. I just…” Her eyes fixed on those ears again. They looked a little bit like fox ears, tall and triangular, pointy, but not as big in proportion to the head as a real fox’s ears. As she watched, one of them twitched to the side and then back again. And yet they weren’t really there. They couldn’t be. She could see through them. They were faint around the edges, as if made of smoke. “Can I get you anything else?” asked the confused barista who clearly didn’t realize that he’d sprouted an extra pair of ears. Seph had to make a conscious effort to compose herself. “No. I’m fine.” Then, lamely, she said, “I haven’t been sleeping well. I’m sorry.”He assured her that it was no problem and went back to work, but those strange ears seemed to rotate toward her as he turned away, as if watching her. (Listening to her?)Needing to find something to focus on besides the top of the barista’s head, she opened her purse and dug out her keys. When she looked up again, the ears hadn’t gone away and still no one seemed to have noticed them. She looked to see if any of her friends were still in the shop, but they’d all three left by now.Another customer approached the counter, an older woman with a prim look about her, and Seph stepped out of the way. This woman looked right at the barista as he assured her that he’d be right with her, and yet she completely ignored the perky, transparent ears, even though they were plainly visible and even appeared to be faintly glowing. Was this some kind of elaborate prank? Was she on camera? Was this guy one of those street magicians or something? Even that didn’t make sense. How would you pull off an illusion like this? The ears—or whatever they were—moved with his head, remaining in place even as he moved about behind the counter. It looked far too perfect to be any kind of holographic manipulation. Finally, her Americano came up. She took it, thanked him and then quickly walked out of the coffee shop, somehow resisting the urge to break into a run. She slipped behind the wheel of her truck (a full-sized Ford pickup; she might be small at only five-foot-three, but she was formidable enough on the highway) and sat there for a moment, her eyes closed, trying to make sense of what she’d seen. It couldn’t have been real. It was too ridiculous to be real. Clearly she’d imagined the whole thing. She hadn’t slept well the past two nights. She’d tossed and turned. She’d dreamed those strange dreams. Obviously, she was even more sleep-deprived than she thought. She was hallucinating. She took off her glasses again and rubbed at her weary eyes. She might’ve laughed, if she wasn’t so worried about the interview. She still had to drive all the way to Cakwetak, which was practically Milwaukee. Once there, she’d have to find a way to not look like a total mess in front of the human resources director. Returning the glasses to her face, she looked out across the parking lot. She could see several people walking around. None of them had spectral ears sprouting from their heads. She’d be all right. It was the stress, she realized. She was so worried about this interview. Once it was over, maybe she’d be able to sleep again. She pulled out of the parking lot and headed east.
* * *
The interview went well enough, she supposed. She didn’t start hallucinating any animal parts on the human resources director and make a complete fool of herself, at least. She thought she responded with all the right answers. But she kept thinking that she looked terrible. She felt twitchy, wired, probably from too much caffeine. No matter how hard she tried to forget the strange incident at the coffee shop, her mind kept returning to it. “He thought I was on drugs,” she said. “I know it.” “Will you just relax already?” sighed Amethyst. “You did fine.” Amethyst Wilhoit was Seph’s roommate. They were paired together by chance their sophomore year in the dorm and hit it off much better than did Seph and her freshman roommate. (That girl had some serious baggage.) Now they shared an apartment close to the campus, where Amethyst had moved on to graduate studies.She was tall and slender, shapely, with long, wavy, brown hair and soft features. She had a lovely face, except for a faint, wide scar beneath her left eye, a remnant of a nasty fall when she was just a girl. She was utterly convinced that this blemish was an insurmountable flaw, but Seph thought it gave her a unique kind of character. And it’d never deterred the boys from flocking to her. In fact, it was impossible to tell if any man had ever even noticed the scar. Their eyes didn’t usually go that far up. They never made it past her huge breasts.They were sitting at a table at a little café just a couple blocks from their apartment, waiting on their lunch. The place had become a favorite for both of them almost as soon as they moved in. It was quiet, cozy, within walking distance and the food was tasty and reasonably priced. Seph groaned. “I totally blew it.”“Stop it,” said Amethyst. “It’s only been two days. They probably haven’t even finished interviewing the other applicants yet.”This was probably true, and yet Seph couldn’t help it. She was sure she’d botched it. And it wasn’t even her fault. It was those dreams. The restless nights. That bizarre hallucination at the coffee shop. “You couldn’t fail,” Amethyst assured her. “I was sending you good energy all day.”“I told you I don’t believe in that stuff.”“You don’t have to.” She took a sip of her tea and stared across the table at her. Seph didn’t bother arguing with her. There wasn’t any point in it. Amethyst was an unwavering believer in the power of positive energy. She was utterly convinced that people could affect the world around them with little more than a sickening dose of cheerful optimism. Okay…so there was a little more to it than that. Amethyst believed in karma and in the idea that what you fed into the universe determined the quality of your life. She believed in positive and negative emotional energy, which could somehow be used to affect those around her. And which could be measured by examining a person’s aura. Apparently. Amethyst, who meditated daily and adhered to a strictly vegan diet, supposedly possessed a very clean aura. Seph, who did neither of those things, was burdened by a “muddy” aura. Or so Amethyst had informed her. Seph’s personal opinion of the matter was that the only thing making anything “muddy” was the large quantity of bullshit, but she was polite enough not to say so. “I’m right. You’ll see.”Seph stared out the window at nothing in particular. “If you say so.” She was too tired to argue about this right now. She slept a little better after the interview, but only a little. She was still plagued by those weird dreams, still tossing and turning. Last night was a little better still. It seemed to finally be going away, but the damage had been done. If she’d blown this interview, she was going to be sorely disappointed in herself. “You’re totally going to get that second interview. Just wait.” Seph sipped her Coke and let her gaze drift across the room. Just wait. She hated the waiting. The waiting was the worst part. It could be another two weeks or more before she heard back, regardless of their decision. And if she didn’t start getting more sleep soon, it was going to be a very long wait. She needed this job. All through college, she’d lived on her student loans and the moderately sizeable bank account that her father left her. The money would sustain her comfortably for a few more years, even after paying back the loans, but it wouldn’t last forever. If she didn’t want to end up flat broke she was going to have to find a job with some kind of future. This might be her one chance to do what she wanted with her life, instead of laboring away in some bleak factory somewhere. But then something caught her attention that made her forget about the interview. A television was on in the corner of the room. There was a news story. A picture of a familiar face. A sort of average face. The kind of face that was kind of attractive, but easily forgotten. Except she hadn’t forgotten the barista’s face at all. She could still picture him clearly in her mind. And although she couldn’t see any ghostly animal ears on the young man whose face was on the television, it was clearly him. The headline announced that a body had been identified. “What’s that about?”Amethyst turned around, confused, and looked at the television. “Oh… You didn’t hear about that? It was awful. It was all over the news this morning.”“I was trying to sleep in.”“They found that guy in the middle of an empty parking lot. His body was all…broken.” A look of revulsion passed over her face as she recalled the gruesome details of the report. “I guess nobody saw anything, not even on security cameras. It was like he just dropped out of the sky. Super creepy.”Seph stared at the screen, horrified. “I just saw that guy…” she breathed. Amethyst’s eyes grew wide. “You knew him?”She shook her head. “No. I just…saw him. He was a barista at this coffee shop where I was meeting some friends. I’d never seen him before then.”Amethyst shuddered. “That’s creepy.”Creepy wasn’t the half of it. She stared at the guy’s picture. His name was Coby Bilk, according to the caption on the screen. But she never got his name. She never looked at his nametag. She was too busy staring at his ghostly ears. That this guy, of all guys, should turn up dead… What did it mean? The news story switched over to something else and Seph lowered her eyes as the waitress appeared with her plate. Suddenly, she’d lost her appetite. She decided to get her chicken salad to go.
* * *
Seph didn’t sleep very well again that night. She had nightmares about Coby Bilk and his strange, ghostly ears. It was late at night and even darker than it should’ve been. The streetlights were all out. Nobody was around. He was running for his life, screaming, begging for help. But she didn’t know how to help him. The next night was a little better. And the next night was better still. By the end of the weekend, she was feeling much more like her old self again. Better still, she was offered a second interview for the graphic design job, scheduled for Thursday afternoon. She dismissed her curious hallucination as a side-effect of stress and lack of sleep and even managed to push from her mind the strange coincidence of the barista’s terrible death. It helped that the news story had been brushed aside in favor of an even more awful story about some kind of freak accident at a manufacturing facility in Sewart, Wisconsin. Thirty-seven people were dead. And it seemed as though no one could explain exactly how or why this tragedy happened. There were too many conflicting and confusing reports. It might have been either a disgruntled employee, a terrorist attack or some kind of insane viral outbreak, among other bizarre theories. She’d stopped paying attention to the reports. It was too disturbing. As sorry as she was to hear about all the victims and their poor families, there simply wasn’t anything she could do about it. She had her own life to lead and she needed to stay focused. And she did stay focused. She was well-prepared and much more confident for her second interview. By the time she left, she was quite proud of herself. In all, it was a good day for her. She walked out of the building with her head held high, confident this time that she’d be asked back for the third and final interview. But as she walked to her truck, she looked out across the busy street and glimpsed a middle-aged man pushing his way through the crowd as if in a hurry, a cell phone pressed to his ear, wearing a suit jacket and tie. He looked just like any other self-absorbed, inconsiderate jerk, except for the ghostly, glowing ears protruding from his graying hair. Seph stopped and stood there, her car keys dangling from her hand, staring. He didn’t see her looking at him. He didn’t seem to see anyone. He practically knocked an old woman over in his rush. He appeared to be having a heated conversation with whoever was on the other end of the line. People saw him perfectly fine. They gave him dirty looks as he passed. But none of them stared at him in any way that would suggest that they saw glowing animal ears sprouting from his head. She watched him walk, trying to blink away whatever it was that was making her eyes hallucinate this strange vision again, but they wouldn’t go. The ears stubbornly refused to disappear, no matter how hard she tried to look past them. They looked different from the ears she’d seen on Coby Bilk. They were more round than pointy. More like a bear’s ears, perhaps, although it was difficult to tell from this distance. Then the man turned the corner and was gone. Seph looked around. No one else had ghostly animal ears. Everyone else looked perfectly normal. She stood there a moment, confused, and then continued on toward her car.
* * *
Seph was nervous for the next couple days. Partly because she was waiting to hear back about the interview, but also because she couldn’t stop thinking of those two, bizarre hallucinations. What did it mean? Why was it happening to her?She was beginning to fear that she was having some manner of mental breakdown. And this was a lousy time to have one of those. She was so close to achieving her career goal. It had to be the stress. She was so worried about this interview process. It must have been messing with her head. And as the weekend came and went, that seemed to be precisely the case. The world went on about its business as she waited to hear back about the job. She went out several times. She even went to the mall and had lunch with her mother, who wanted to hear all about her interviews. She saw hundreds of people. Thousands, perhaps, and not one of them had a pair of weird, ghostly ears sprouting from their skulls. She didn’t tell her mom about her hallucinations, of course. She didn’t tell anyone. She didn’t want anyone to know how badly her mind had unraveled itself. It was no one else’s business. Then Wednesday evening came around and Seph found herself sitting in front of the television, staring at another familiar face on the screen. Baxter Winger had turned up dead alongside Interstate Ninety-Four, his mangled body left within plain sight of traffic, and yet there were no witnesses. She stared at his picture, her stomach twisting into a hot, slimy knot inside her. He didn’t have animal ears in the picture, ghostly or otherwise, but she recognized him immediately as the rude man on the far side of the street in Cakwetak. It had happened again. Twice she’d seen those strange ears and twice the person had ended up dead. And violently so. What was going on? Why was this happening? Were the ears some sort of death omen? And if so, why was she the only one who could see them? What the hell was she supposed to do about something like that? It wasn’t as if she could tell anyone. They’d tell her she was crazy. She’d tell her she was crazy. It was ridiculous! She tried to make sense of it. She must be mistaken. Maybe these weren’t the same people at all. Maybe she was only projecting the faces of these dead men onto her memory of those people her stressed brain decided to fool her into thinking had those stupid, phantom ears. That had to be it. It didn’t make much sense, but that was the only possible explanation. She turned off the television and went to bed. But she didn’t sleep well again that night.
* * *
Seph was offered her third and final interview. It was on Thursday, the sixth of November, about a week after Baxter Winger was reported dead, at one o’clock in the afternoon.Overall, she was confident. She hadn’t had any more hallucinations to rattle her, and she’d been avoiding the news, just to be certain nothing else would distract her, so she felt well-composed and perfectly professional. She was even running early that morning, arriving in Cakwetak with plenty of time to spare, so she stopped at a drive-through and treated herself to a pumpkin spice latte. That was when her luck turned sour. As soon as she pulled out onto the main road again, she was cut off by a moving truck that changed lanes without signaling. She slammed on the Ford’s brakes and swerved, narrowly avoiding a collision and spilling the latte on her good dress pants. She cursed at the other driver—and at the scalding pain of the hot beverage soaking into her pants leg—and merged into traffic. This was going to be a problem. She couldn’t possibly expect to be taken seriously if she showed up for this important interview in stained clothes, but it wasn’t as if she’d thought to bring a spare outfit. She did her best to mop up the spill with a napkin, but the stain wasn’t coming out. And it wasn’t subtle, either. It was huge. She groaned, frustrated, and checked the time. She was still early. There was time to fix this. She changed lanes and turned at the next intersection instead of going straight. The Cakwetak shopping mall was directly ahead. If she was quick, she could pop in, get a new pair of pants, change and then be on her way again. It might be cutting it close, but she was certain she could pull it off if there weren’t any more unexpected complications. She parked near the bookstore and started inside, resisting the impatient urge to pick up her pace beyond a brisk walk. It felt like a mile to the nearest apparel store, but she still had time. She didn’t need to run. Or even jog. There was no good reason to tire herself out and show up to the interview looking like she’d just left the gym. But that bad luck was still with her. As she was riding up the escalator to the second floor, gazing down at the storefronts below her, it happened again. A young woman emerged from the Bath and Body Works and set off toward the food court. She was slender and pretty, wearing skinny jeans, stylish boots and a yellow, long-sleeve shirt. She had a playful, blonde ponytail and a pair of ghostly, glowing ears protruding from her head just above the neat line of her bangs. Seph’s heart instantly sank. No. She couldn’t deal with this right now. She didn’t have time. But the last two people she saw with those ears had turned up dead, and violently so. How long would it be before this blonde girl turned up on the news as well, her body brutally mangled?She couldn’t let it happen again. She’d never have a good night’s sleep again if she had to deal with that kind of guilt. But what was she supposed to do? Just forget about her interview? Throw away all that she’d worked for? This was her dream. This was her chance to do what she wanted with her life. Besides, she couldn’t just walk up to this girl and say, “Excuse me, but do you realize that you have a pair of phantom animal ears stuck to your head? No? Well it’s no surprise since I’m the only one who seems to be able to see them. The problem is that I’m pretty sure you’re going to die horribly sometime soon.” The only thing the poor girl would be afraid of would be the crazy, bespectacled weirdo with stained pants who approached her in the middle of a crowded mall to tell her this. No. That wouldn’t do at all. In fact, she couldn’t think of a single thing she could possibly say or do to convince the ponytailed blonde that her life might be in danger without sounding like a complete mental case. It wasn’t an ideal situation by any means. It was downright unfair. But there simply wasn’t anything she could do. It wasn’t her duty to protect these people. She wasn’t responsible for them. She didn’t even believe in this kind of stuff. And she had important things to do today. Seph reached the top of the escalator and walked away from the doomed blonde.
Chapter 2
Piper Holleworth had a lot of nicknames. She wasn’t sure why. People just seemed to decide for whatever reason that she needed to be called something different than what she’d been named, as if "Piper" were too long or cumbersome, or simply wasn’t the right fit for her. Almost nobody called her Piper. Various people called her Pipe, Pipes, Pip, Pippy, Pips, Pipey, Peeps or sometimes just Pi. Her childhood best friend, Wanda Janger, for reasons utterly unbeknownst to anyone except Wanda because she refused to explain it to anybody, called her Babs. And when she was nine, she had a little cousin who took to calling her Peepee, which was mortifying to Piper, but apparently uproariously hilarious to every other member of her family. She still couldn’t attend a holiday gathering without her uncle bellowing, “Peepee’s here!” the moment he caught sight of her. Piper preferred to be Piper. That was her name, exactly as it appeared on her birth certificate, exactly as her mother had intended, and exactly as it was printed on her Bath and Body Works nametag as she left for lunch that peculiar Thursday afternoon. The day hadn’t been peculiar up until this point. In fact, it’d been a perfectly normal morning, even rather pleasant. It didn’t become weird until she made a detour to use the restroom at the end of the rental lockers hallway. It wasn’t even unusual for her to use this restroom. She couldn’t count the times she’d made this exact same stop on her way to lunch. The food court was at the far end of the mall, and the restrooms near there naturally tended to be busy this time of day. It was almost always much better to use this one. Today, she had it entirely to herself. Or she thought she did. As she was washing her hands, and while she was checking her makeup in the mirror, she glimpsed something moving beneath one of the stall doors. At first, she thought it was a shoe, but the stall door was cracked open, as if empty. This made no sense, of course, because who used a public restroom and left the stall open? Didn’t that defeat the purpose of even having a stall? She stared into the mirror as she finished scrubbing her hands, watching for it to appear again, but there was nothing there. She dismissed it as her imagination and moved over to the automatic dryer. The motor was loud enough to drown out most of the surrounding noises, so she didn’t hear anything. But when she glanced up at the mirror again, she saw one of the stall doors—a different stall this time—swing slowly closed. Piper stopped and turned around, her slender hands still damp.The hand dryer roared on for a moment longer, then wound to a stop. The silence that followed was heavy. No music played in here. No voices drifted this far from the main floor. She could hear the ventilation system humming faintly. She could hear the soft buzzing of the overhead lights. But other than that, the only sound was the thumping of her heart in her breast and the rush of blood in her ears. She could see no one from where she stood. The restroom still seemed to be empty. Was it only a breeze that nudged the door? Was that first shadow she glimpsed only a loose strand of tissue gently tossed around by a draft from the heating vents? She’d been working at one store or another at this mall for the better part of six years and had used this very restroom more times than she could recall. She’d never had any reason to feel spooked before. Not here. But now her heart was pounding. Her reflection in the mirrors stared back at her with startled eyes. A frightful panic was building inside her. She took a deep breath and willed herself to calm down. Nothing was happening. It was her imagination. It wouldn’t be the first time it got the better of her. As a little girl, she’d frequently frightened herself. She was always convinced that there was something hiding under her bed or in her closet or else lurking just outside her window. She’d run her poor father ragged every night, peering into all the places a boogeyman might be able to fit, sometimes places no one else ever thought to look. But that was a long time ago. Well…not that long ago. She was only twenty-four. But she’d grown up. She wasn’t afraid of the dark anymore. She didn’t believe in monsters. It was just…nerves, perhaps. Too much caffeine. Or maybe she hadn’t been getting quite enough sleep. She needed to stop staying up so late reading those paranormal romances, but she couldn’t help herself. She was addicted, and had been since she was thirteen. Her cell phone buzzed in her purse, startling her as it alerted her to a new text message. Embarrassed by her own silliness, she fished it out and glanced at the screen. It was Meg again. As far as roommates went, Meg wasn’t the worst. She and Piper shared a dorm room their first three years of college, and had since upgraded to an apartment. They got along fine. She cleaned up after herself and did her share of the chores. Even her various boyfriends had all been tolerable. The only problem with Meg was that she was considerably prone to crises. It seemed that every few months her world completely fell apart for one idiotic reason or another. And every time it happened, she could be counted on to behave like a complete lunatic about it. She became brash, impulsive and paranoid. She’d jump to the most ludicrous conclusions. She’d make wild accusations. And she’d almost always end up doing something regrettable. Just last night, her fragile plane of existence was once again shattered when she discovered her laptop had gone missing. Piper wasn’t all that concerned about the laptop. It wasn’t that she didn’t care about Meg’s plight. It was that this was the fourth time she’d misplaced it. It’d always turned up before, usually having been left somewhere stupid. But that hadn’t stopped her from completely flipping out about it. Again. The text message was a rambling, poorly-spelled and far-too-long account of her failed attempts to retrieve her lost property. Her boyfriend, Martin, didn’t have it. Her friends hadn’t seen it. It hadn’t turned up at the library or coffee shop or in any of her classrooms. It seemed to be gone, and she was sure it’d been stolen this time. The contents of the missing laptop included three term papers and one essay due first thing Monday morning, yet she seemed far more concerned with her photo album, which contained her only copy of many of the pictures she’d taken throughout her college years. (Why these things weren’t properly backed up after having experienced this very same crisis three times previously was unconceivable to Piper, but here she was again.) She patiently responded that the last time she’d seen it was the day before yesterday, when she was using Facebook to procrastinate on her homework, and wished her good luck in her search. As she slipped the phone back into her purse, she heard a distinct “clunk” from one of the stalls in front of her and she froze. That stubborn, childhood fear crept through her again, driving dark things from the long-buried depths of her imagination. Seconds ticked by as she stood there, listening, waiting. The noise didn’t come again. And she still seemed to be alone in the room, and yet it seemed to her that she could hear something else. It was a low, drawn-out murmuring…almost whispering… But she couldn’t tell where it was coming from. Maybe it was the plumbing making noise. It was, after all, a very big building, with no-telling how many miles of pipes running through the walls and ceilings, feeding toilets, sinks, water fountains and kitchens. A single broken fixture could affect the water pressure and make noise up and down the line, she was sure. That was probably it. She scolded herself for being so ridiculous and turned back to the mirror. She checked to make sure her makeup and hair were still as they should be (and also that she didn’t look exactly like someone who’d just had a strange, mini-freakout for no apparent reason in the restroom). But before she could turn and walk away, she saw a strange, black shape dart over the top of one of the stall walls behind her, out of one and into another. It happened so quickly she couldn’t possibly perceive what it looked like. It was little more than an inky, black shadow. As if to assert that it had not been her imagination, the door of the stall into which the shadowy thing had just dropped suddenly slammed shut, startling from her a shrill scream. She turned and faced the stalls again, her heart pounding harder than ever. “Is someone there?” she called. Nothing answered her, of course. Why would it? What would a scary, black shadow-thing say? But she could still hear that eerie whispering noise. It seemed to float on the air, like a faint stench. Her wide, blue eyes flitted toward the door. It was time to leave. But would she be able to? Every horror novel she’d ever read came flooding back to her in a single, blood-curdling instant and her only thought was, Oh god, I’m that pretty, clueless girl who’s body is the first to turn up!In her defense, her first thoughts about things didn’t usually include something about her being pretty. She had a fairly good idea that she was an attractive person. There’d been a seemingly endless line of boys in her life that’d had obnoxious crushes on her. She enjoyed looking pretty. She enjoyed fashion. She liked making her hair cute. She loved shopping for makeup and accessories. But she wasn’t obsessed with those things. Not like she was with her books. Still holding her breath, she started moving toward the door. Slowly. She didn’t want to provoke the thing into attacking her if she could help it. For all she knew, it didn’t yet know that she was even there. Except, of course, for the fact that she’d just asked it if it was there… So, yeah… It knew she was there. And that she knew it was there. Stupid!It was time to go. But before she could move, she heard a terrible gurgling noise from right behind her. With a startled, “Eek!” she turned and almost tripped herself backing away from the sinks as a strange, gooey mass boiled up out of each of the four drains. Strange, tentacle-like shapes were rising from the goo and reaching outward. Some were stretching toward her. Others were intertwining together, converging into a single, larger shape that crawled up the mirror like a fat, misshapen spider. Piper stared at the awful thing, horrified. Strange, shadowy shapes writhed inside it, shades of gray pulling themselves apart from the black, creating patterns that almost looked like human body parts. The whole time, that awful whispering continued. It felt as if it were inside her very head. She didn’t realize she was still backing away until her heel struck the wall. She stood there, too numb with fear to think what to do next, her mind struggling to find a reasonable explanation for what was happening, but she couldn’t think of one. This couldn’t be real. This had to be some kind of bizarre hallucination. Something moved in her peripheral vision and she dared to look away from the thing clinging to the mirror. More of those strange, black tendrils were slithering out from under the stall doors and across the floor, joining with the ones that oozed down over the edges of the sinks, merging into a single entity. It was all one creature, she realized. An awful thing, like nothing she’d ever seen before. Like nothing she’d ever even imagined. Able to pull itself apart and knit itself back together again. It was coming out of the drains, a blob-like thing emerging from the dark, stinking depths of the sewers. Black, pulsing, snake-like tendrils reached across the walls, branching out like veins as the larger shape on the mirror swelled and began to take form. Within seconds, it had become a crouching, menacing figure that was almost man-shaped. This wasn’t happening. It wasn’t real. It couldn’tbe real because things like this didn’t exist. Not in the real world. And yet here it was, perched atop the sinks, clinging to the mirror right before her startled eyes. She stared at it, her terror growing with each frantic thump of her heart. She’d never been so afraid in her entire life. She needed to leave, but she was too scared to move. Those queer shades of gray ran together, forming patterns that looked like bones, and a ghastly face emerged, an impossibly gaping mouth and screaming eyes that were somehow both empty and hungry.It turned its strange head to one side and then the other, as if taking in its surroundings. She told herself again that it wasn’t real…but it was right there…she was looking right at it…The door was only a few feet away. All she had to do was run. Yet her brain wasn’t functioning properly. She couldn’t seem to shift her body into gear. All she could do was stand there, her mouth open in a frozen, silent scream, staring at the horrible image before her. The thing tilted its head and leaned forward, as if studying her. Then it lifted a hand…or at least, something that vaguely resembled a hand. It was impossibly long, skeletal, with sharp, hard angles, but also strangely droopy, like a plastic doll that was half-melted. It seemed to point at her for a moment, as if accusing her. Go!she told herself. Get out of here!Slowly, her back still pressed against the wall, she began to move sideways toward the door. The awful, gaping shape of the thing’s mouth opened even wider, as if in a silent scream, and those creepy, skeleton fingers crept toward her. Overhead, those strange, vein-like tendrils began to ooze downward, closing in around her like the bars of a hellish cage. There was a scream bubbling up from somewhere deep inside her. She could feel it. But somehow, it just wouldn’t come. Her throat wouldn’t open to let it out. She reached out with her hand, reaching toward the doorway beside her, and bumped one of the automatic hand dryers. It roared to life, startling her, and she snatched her hand back a split-second before the creature lashed out at the sudden sound, shattering the dryer’s plastic case. She dropped to the floor, terrified, and let out what she thought would be an ear-splitting scream, but turned out to be nothing more than a shrill squeak.The monster let out an awful groan and slashed at the dryer again. She ducked under its outstretched arm and bolted from the restroom. She ran back down the empty corridor, past the rental lockers to the open space of the mall’s main floor. She filled her lungs to scream for help, determined to do much more than just squeak this time, but when she glanced over her shoulder to see how close the thing was, she found that it wasn’t there. It hadn’t chased her out into the corridor. She was entirely alone. She stopped, her eyes wide, her heart still hammering in her chest. She was practically panting. Where was it? She knew she didn’t imagine it. There were still flecks of shattered plastic on her shoulder, as real as her own skin. She searched the corridor for the slightest motion, the faintest of creeping shadows, but it was utterly silent. There was nothing. Not even that bizarre whispering noise.No. That was no hallucination. She was sure of it. She took a step backward. No one would ever believe her. They’d say she was crazy. She’d be locked up for sure. Then a thought occurred to her: She couldn’t see it because it wasn’t in the corridor anymore. It was behind her. She turned, terrified, to find a black figure standing right there, reaching out for her.
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November 29, 2014
Sneak Peek - RUSHED: HEDGE LAKE
The fourth book in the Rushed series is here December 11!
When a terrifying dream leaves Eric with a familiar, urgent compulsion to get up and leave his home, he fears that he’s in for a frightful case of déjà vu. But what he finds waiting for him at the end of his long drive north is unlike anything he's yet seen. The Hedge Lake Triangle is a hotspot of paranormal activity claiming everything from mysterious disappearances and hauntings to UFOs and monster sightings. He’ll need all his wits and then some, because something unthinkable lurks beneath the surface of the lake and he only has until the rain falls to navigate the endless horrors and face the evil that awaits him at the bottom of the triangle.
Read on to preview the entire first chapter!
Chapter One
Eric’s eyes flashed open. He was lying in bed, clutching the sheets to his bare chest and staring up at the familiar, white ceiling of his bedroom. The morning sunlight poured through the window blinds and painted brilliant stripes across the wall. He could hear birds singing outside, but it was otherwise quiet. Peaceful. Deceptively calm. As if all were well with the world. He was trembling. His heart was racing. He struggled to catch his breath. A strange terror was welling up within him, slowly overwhelming him.Don’t let it take me!His cell phone rang. He snatched it off the nightstand beside him and held it to his ear. “You can’t ignore it,” said Isabelle. He ran a hand through his tousled hair and groaned. “I know.” He pushed aside the covers and sat up. “Damn it…”He’d prayed that it was only a dream when it woke him the previous morning. But the fact was that he didn’t have very many dreams that he could actually remember in any detail. Not anymore. What little he could recall was usually nonsense. Most mornings, he woke up with no memory of his dreams, only a curious feeling that he’d been dreaming of something very profound.But this dream had not only been incredibly vivid, it had come to him two nights in a row. And it left him feeling oddly restless…as though he had somewhere he needed to be…“It’s a lot like the first dream you had,” Isabelle said. “The one that brought you to me.”It was. It wasn’t as strong, but he felt that same, irrational compulsion to get dressed and go somewhere. The difference was that he hadn’t been able to remember that dream. Not until he set out to silence it. This one, however, he remembered quite clearly. It was deep winter under a gloomy, gray sky. A thick blanket of snow had settled over the floor of a naked forest. The wind was blowing stiff and cold. He could remember precisely how it felt, biting his skin right through his clothes. Except that they weren’t his clothes. It wasn’t even his skin. It wasn’t he who was out in this bleak wilderness. It was someone else. A woman, he thought, though he couldn’t be entirely sure. It was bizarre. He seemed to be inside her skin, feeling the wind that stung her face, struggling through the snow, gasping for every icy breath. He could feel her pounding heart as if it were inside his own chest. He saw the frozen wilderness with her eyes, felt the gripping terror that was rapidly swallowing her. And yet he also felt as if he were miles away, like he was looking up from the bottom of a deep, dark well. Something was in that forest. Something terrifying. He could hear it. She could hear it. Behind him. Behind her. Eric rubbed at his eyes. It was all so confusing. It was only a dream, but it was so vivid. So real. He was still tangled up in those emotions. He remembered a steep slope. He—no, she—stumbled and fell, sliding through the snow, scraping the numb flesh on the palms of her bare hands. He looked down at his own hands now. It felt so real, even now, that he was surprised to find them unblemished. Great, rocky bluffs rose up on either side as the woman fled deeper into the thickly wooded gully. Then she went too far. The ground vanished beneath her. She dropped twenty feet and landed hard on the ice. So much pain…“You know it won’t stop,” Isabelle reminded him. “You’ll live through that every night until you go. It’ll drive you mad.”He wanted to argue that they knew no such thing, but he would only be stalling. Deep down, he understood. It was too much like the other dream. He knew it the first time it woke him, if he were to be honest. It was why he’d gone to sleep with his phone on the nightstand, with Isabelle only an arm’s length away. He was being summoned again.“You already know where you have to go.” He sighed and stood up. “North,” he said. He scratched his neck and shook his head, frustrated. “I go north.”“I’ll be with you the whole way,” promised Isabelle. “Like always.”“I know. Thank you.” He hung up the phone and turned off the alarm that never had a chance to wake him. Usually, he wouldn’t even hit the snooze for the first time for another twenty minutes yet. He dressed himself as his mind circled around the awful, lingering dream. He couldn’t stop thinking about the end, those last few moments before he was mercifully torn from the nightmare and returned to consciousness. Through tears of terror and agony he saw a wide, frozen lake stretching out from the narrow cove where the woman lay broken upon the cracked ice. Above her, high bluffs and crowding trees. And something else, too, something big moving through the trees. A burning glow high up in the branches. An awful shriek. Then chaos. And more pain. She cried out for help, and although he was sure she must have been crying out to God on that bloody ice, a final, desperate prayer, he could’ve sworn that she was speaking to him. Don’t let it take me!He shuddered hard at those words, the final thing he’d heard before the dream shattered and ejected him back into his peaceful bedroom again. It wasn’t just a dream. It was real. That woman was real. The thing that was chasing her was real. Her sufferingwas real. But those events didn’t happen recently. That lake was deeply frozen. It was the middle of winter. It was now late April. That left one important question: Had the awful scene taken place in a winter past…or in a winter yet to be? He made his way downstairs, where he found Karen in the kitchen, already busying herself with her baking. She had four hundred cupcakes to bake for a wedding the next day. For most people, waiting until the morning before would be pushing it, but Karen was not most people. She was ridiculously talented in the kitchen and made a considerable amount of spending money as a freelance cake decorator and caterer. She was perfectly content to simply rise a little earlier than usual. “You’re up early,” she observed, barely sparing him a glance as she poured sugar into her mixer. Holly sat at the table, separating paper baking cups and slipping them into muffin pans. She turned and looked up at him, brushing her long, red hair from her pretty face and offering him her usual, sweet smile. “Good morning!” As always, she was exceedingly cheerful, as if she’d never been dealt a single reason to be anything but optimistic and full of hope.“Good morning,” he said to both of them as he poured himself a cup of coffee. “Did you have the dream again?” asked Karen. It wasn’t a secret. He hadn’t kept it from her. He neverkept things from her. Not for long. He might occasionally downplay just how much peril he’d found himself in, like that time he was shot at by a fat, psychotic cowboy. (It was better that she not know just how narrowly he’d escaped that encounter.) But he always told her the rest of it, regardless of how frightening or disturbing (or unflattering or embarrassing) his exploits might be. They were always honest with each other. “I did.”“So you’ll be leaving again?”“Looks like it.”To anyone who didn’t know her, she would have looked unnaturally calm, as if the idea of him venturing off on another of his weird adventures wasn’t the least bit terrifying to her. But Eric knew her far better than anyone. She wasn’t comfortable expressing her feelings. She bottled them up inside and put on false faces. It was an old coping mechanism that had served her through some rough adolescent years, and an apparently unbreakable habit even after all this time. Right now, she was feigning disinterest and a little bit of annoyance. He was about to go off on another stupid road trip to get himself hurt again. A silly boy and his silly adventures. But he knew that deep inside, in that fragile part of her that she kept locked up tight, she was very much afraid. “Do you know where you’re going?” she asked as she started up her mixer. “North,” he replied. “Just north?”“Just north.”“That’s not very specific.”Eric took a sip of his coffee and then cocked his head thoughtfully. “It’s pretty specific. When you get down to it. I mean, it’s precisely as specific as a compass needle.”“How far north?” she pressed. “Like, up north? In Northern Wisconsin? Upper Peninsula? Or are we talking Canada north? Or Santa’s workshop north?”“Can’t say. I guess I’ll know it when I get there.”“The lake,” agreed Holly as she continued prepping the muffin pans. “Where the people in the mist wander. With the beast with many names. And where the funny space men play with their toys.”Eric and Karen both looked at her, but she kept her eyes on the task before her, as if she hadn’t said anything strange at all. “Right…” said Karen. “There you go. Just look for all that stuff.”Eric nodded. “Yeah. That should narrow it down for me.”Holly smiled her sweet smile. “What does Isabelle say?” asked Karen. “That I should hurry.”“Definitely,” agreed Holly. “Something’s going to happen there. I can’t see what it is, but it’s going to be bad.” Eric had been lifting his cup to his lips, but he lowered it again without sipping. “How bad?”“Way bad.” “Can you give me an example of what ‘way bad’ might entail? I’m still a little hazy on just how bad things can actually get.”Holly set aside the prepared muffin pan and reached for the next one. She seemed surprisingly casual for someone discussing dire portents about his eminent journey. “It’s hard to say for sure. But I’m certain that anyone near that lake is in terrible danger.”Karen frowned at Holly. “One of your spells told you all this?”She nodded. Eric met Holly Shorring the previous summer. She was a member of a coven of witches who had sought his help against a powerful and murderous wizard who was hunting them down one by one. Although he hadn’t believed in magic when he met her, she and her sisters had thoroughly convinced him otherwise. (He didn’t understand it, but he absolutely believed in it.)Holly was young, only twenty, and strikingly beautiful. She also possessed a remarkably endearing personality. She was sweet, kind, resourceful and clever. Everyone who had met her since she moved to Creek Bend adored her. But when he first laid eyes on her, she was dancing provocatively on a stage in a nude bar in rural Illinois. Karen had been understandably irate about him returning home just prior to their wedding anniversary with a gorgeous, young stripper. And she still hadn’t let it go. Nor would she. Ever. She had no intention of letting him forget it as long as they both lived, regardless of how and why it happened. And he could hardly blame her. He knew perfectly well how fortunate he was to have survived that ordeal, and with all his bits and bobs intact, no less. At the same time, however, Karen had managed to harbor not a single ounce of ill will toward Holly. In fact, like everyone else, she’d quickly grown quite fond of the girl. She’d taken her under her wing and treated her like a member of the family almost from the start. Hardly a day went by when she wasn’t here in this kitchen, helping Karen with her baking, or out assisting with a delivery.Eric had long ago stopped trying to point out that if he’d never brought her home, Karen would have missed out on having such a dear friend enter her life. That was not the point. That had nothing to do with it. His crimes remained unforgiveable, regardless of her fondness for the very object of her insatiable wrath. (He’d also long since stopped trying to makes sense of the situation.)It didn’t hurt that Holly and Karen had turned out to have a lot in common. They were practically made to be best friends. They could’ve been long-lost sisters. For starters, Holly was a skilled baker in her own right. She had a particularly special talent for making cookies. Also, Holly had a peculiar way of encouraging people to be nice to her. It was a gift she possessed, a sort of psychic power of suggestion. She was a sweet girl who wanted everyone to like her, and so almost everyone who met her found her instantly endearing. (But Karen insisted that this curious ability had nothing to do with it, of course.)“Did your spells tell you anything else?” asked Eric. “Not that I could really understand,” she told him. “Not yet, anyway. Just random images. Nothing that makes much sense.”“I guess that explains the funny space men.”She shrugged her shoulders. “It’s all a little wonky. Maybe once you’re there it’ll be clearer. I’ll call you if I see anything else.”Karen cocked her head and tucked a strand of her brown hair behind her ear. “Wait… You’re not going with him?”“Not this time. The spell said he has to do this on his own.” “Oh…” Karen hadn’t intended to let her go without a fight. She’d made it her business to take care of the girl, after all. But she hadn’t expected to win that argument, much less that there would be no argument at all. Eric nodded. “Then that’s settled,” he decided. He was relieved, actually. As helpful as she’d be if he took her with him (she had saved his life more than once) he was thankful to not have to worry about her getting hurt. Especially since people always managed to get hurt on these weird adventures. “I should get going.”“Oh, and stay away from the water,” added Holly. “At least until I know more.” “No swimming,” confirmed Eric. “Got it.” “What’s wrong with the water?” asked Karen. “There’s blood in it,” replied Holly. Karen shook her head. “Why do I ask these things?” She turned to Eric, looking him over. “Maybe I should go with you.”“You’ve got too much to do,” he replied quickly, gesturing at the cupcakes. The last thing he wanted was for her to tag along. He’d never forgive himself if anything happened to her.“Jess would take over for me if I called her,” she reasoned. “You’d never trust anyone to take over one of your jobs,” he challenged. “Jess is very talented. I know she could handle it.” “You’d worry about it the whole time you were gone.”She knit her eyebrows. He was right, of course, but she wasn’t about to admit it. She took an enormous amount of pride in her work, especially when the job was for something as special as a wedding. It had nothing to do with how much she trusted anyone else to do the job. Once she’d made a commitment to do something, she always saw it through to the end. (Like when she committed herself to never letting him forget how he mucked up their last anniversary weekend.)“He has to do it on his own,” Holly explained. “Neither of us are supposed to go.”“There you go,” said Eric, trying not to sound too relieved. “Can’t argue with magic.”Karen fixed her eyes on Holly for a moment. Although her expression was only thoughtful, he thought he could almost see the real emotions swirling behind her dark eyes. She knew he was right. She couldn’t just abandon her responsibilities here. It was her job to make sure these cupcakes were finished, were beautiful, and were on display in the church before the guests began arriving tomorrow afternoon. It wasn’t even about the money she’d already been paid. It was about keeping her word and ensuring that her part of someone’s beautiful day was as perfect as she could make it. But she also didn’t care for being told what to do. If she wanted to accompany her husband into the unknown, why shouldn’t she be able to? It was also her responsibility to take care of him, to make sure he was safe. What kind of wife would she be if she didn’t do everything in her power to protect him? And this self-proclaimed witch had no business telling her otherwise. Yet the deepest truth of all was that while she was afraid for him, she was even more afraid to go with him. The things he’d described to her, the terrible things he’d seen… She was too cowardly to even sit through a horror movie, much less to live through one. The first time this happened, she didn’t believe it. She thought it was some kind of early mid-life crisis kind of episode, that he’d subconsciously begun to feel trapped in his mundane, English teacher existence and realized that he was only getting older. He just needed a little adventure to make him feel young again. Even when everything started getting weird and he began describing the insane things he was seeing over the phone, she didn’t really believe it. Not even when he began sending her pictures. She told herself it had to be a prank of some sort. At worst, she feared that he might be suffering a serious psychological break, but that was even more terrifying than the idea that all these things were real, so in the end, she’d just gone along with it, almost numb to it all. But it was real. And she had no idea how he kept doing these things. If she’d been with him when that first golem burst from the old wardrobe in that empty house… Well, she doubted very much that she would’ve handled it with half the bravado as her courageous husband (and he’d confidentially admitted to her that he pretty much just ran away screaming like a girl). And now Holly was telling her she wasn’t supposed to go… Finally, she let out an exasperated sigh and met his gaze again. “You be careful out there.”“I always am.”“No, you’re not. You’re always getting yourself bitten by things and falling from high places.”“I wouldn’t say ‘always’…”“Or getting sliced up by something with huge claws.”“But I always come home, remember?”She did remember. It was the one thing he brought back from his time with Holly’s coven that hadn’t earned him her fiery wrath: A prophecy of sorts. A magic spell had given him an assurance that although he would continue to be called away on these strange journeys, he would always return to her. It was a heartening message and it helped to ease her fears. But only a little. “I still don’t know how much I trust this witchcraft stuff,” she told him. Eric glanced at Holly. He recalled his brief time with the coven the previous July, all that he went through, all that he saw. “I trust hermagic,” he told her. And it was the truth.Karen stared thoughtfully at him and said nothing. Though Holly had offered to teach her to use spells, too, she’d refused. In fact, she’d discouraged the girl from using any magic while she lived in Creek Bend. It wasn’t that she disapproved, exactly. After all, this magic had saved her husband’s life. But she found the very concept difficult to handle. It seemed so unnatural. Holly hadn’t pushed the matter. After all, she hardly needed to rely on witchcraft in her everyday life. A man she called “Grandpa,” but who wasn’t a father to either of her parents, had long ago taught her that magic wasn’t something one relied on for just anything. It was only for emergencies. Or special circumstances. Like these dreams Eric was having, for example. “Paul won’t be able to help this time,” said Karen. “I know.” Paul was his older brother. Usually, Karen would call him soon after Eric left and send him to keep an eye on her wayward husband. But today Paul, his wife, Monica, and his son, Kevin, were in Minnesota for a wedding. “It doesn’t matter. He wasn’t much help last time, remember.”“That wasn’t his fault.”“I know. But I still don’t need him.” In fact, he’d prefer that Paul, like Karen and Holly, stay well away from whatever bizarre trouble he was heading into. It was hard enough worrying about his own ass out there, without having to be concerned about someone else’s safety. “Have Isabelle keep me posted.” “She will.”She gave him a kiss and then turned back to her mixing bowls. “Well, get going. You wouldn’t want to be late for whatever trouble you’re about to get yourself into.”She was good. He could almost believe she really wasn’t concerned about him. Eric snatched up his keys. “No. I guess I wouldn’t.”“I love you. Be careful.”“I love you, too,” he assured her. He headed for the door. “Good luck,” said Holly. “Thanks.”As he opened the door, Karen added, “And try not to bring home any more strippers, ‘kay?”
Rushed: Hedge Lake is available for preorder at Amazon and Smashwords.
Get the whole book on December 11!
When a terrifying dream leaves Eric with a familiar, urgent compulsion to get up and leave his home, he fears that he’s in for a frightful case of déjà vu. But what he finds waiting for him at the end of his long drive north is unlike anything he's yet seen. The Hedge Lake Triangle is a hotspot of paranormal activity claiming everything from mysterious disappearances and hauntings to UFOs and monster sightings. He’ll need all his wits and then some, because something unthinkable lurks beneath the surface of the lake and he only has until the rain falls to navigate the endless horrors and face the evil that awaits him at the bottom of the triangle.
Read on to preview the entire first chapter!
Chapter One
Eric’s eyes flashed open. He was lying in bed, clutching the sheets to his bare chest and staring up at the familiar, white ceiling of his bedroom. The morning sunlight poured through the window blinds and painted brilliant stripes across the wall. He could hear birds singing outside, but it was otherwise quiet. Peaceful. Deceptively calm. As if all were well with the world. He was trembling. His heart was racing. He struggled to catch his breath. A strange terror was welling up within him, slowly overwhelming him.Don’t let it take me!His cell phone rang. He snatched it off the nightstand beside him and held it to his ear. “You can’t ignore it,” said Isabelle. He ran a hand through his tousled hair and groaned. “I know.” He pushed aside the covers and sat up. “Damn it…”He’d prayed that it was only a dream when it woke him the previous morning. But the fact was that he didn’t have very many dreams that he could actually remember in any detail. Not anymore. What little he could recall was usually nonsense. Most mornings, he woke up with no memory of his dreams, only a curious feeling that he’d been dreaming of something very profound.But this dream had not only been incredibly vivid, it had come to him two nights in a row. And it left him feeling oddly restless…as though he had somewhere he needed to be…“It’s a lot like the first dream you had,” Isabelle said. “The one that brought you to me.”It was. It wasn’t as strong, but he felt that same, irrational compulsion to get dressed and go somewhere. The difference was that he hadn’t been able to remember that dream. Not until he set out to silence it. This one, however, he remembered quite clearly. It was deep winter under a gloomy, gray sky. A thick blanket of snow had settled over the floor of a naked forest. The wind was blowing stiff and cold. He could remember precisely how it felt, biting his skin right through his clothes. Except that they weren’t his clothes. It wasn’t even his skin. It wasn’t he who was out in this bleak wilderness. It was someone else. A woman, he thought, though he couldn’t be entirely sure. It was bizarre. He seemed to be inside her skin, feeling the wind that stung her face, struggling through the snow, gasping for every icy breath. He could feel her pounding heart as if it were inside his own chest. He saw the frozen wilderness with her eyes, felt the gripping terror that was rapidly swallowing her. And yet he also felt as if he were miles away, like he was looking up from the bottom of a deep, dark well. Something was in that forest. Something terrifying. He could hear it. She could hear it. Behind him. Behind her. Eric rubbed at his eyes. It was all so confusing. It was only a dream, but it was so vivid. So real. He was still tangled up in those emotions. He remembered a steep slope. He—no, she—stumbled and fell, sliding through the snow, scraping the numb flesh on the palms of her bare hands. He looked down at his own hands now. It felt so real, even now, that he was surprised to find them unblemished. Great, rocky bluffs rose up on either side as the woman fled deeper into the thickly wooded gully. Then she went too far. The ground vanished beneath her. She dropped twenty feet and landed hard on the ice. So much pain…“You know it won’t stop,” Isabelle reminded him. “You’ll live through that every night until you go. It’ll drive you mad.”He wanted to argue that they knew no such thing, but he would only be stalling. Deep down, he understood. It was too much like the other dream. He knew it the first time it woke him, if he were to be honest. It was why he’d gone to sleep with his phone on the nightstand, with Isabelle only an arm’s length away. He was being summoned again.“You already know where you have to go.” He sighed and stood up. “North,” he said. He scratched his neck and shook his head, frustrated. “I go north.”“I’ll be with you the whole way,” promised Isabelle. “Like always.”“I know. Thank you.” He hung up the phone and turned off the alarm that never had a chance to wake him. Usually, he wouldn’t even hit the snooze for the first time for another twenty minutes yet. He dressed himself as his mind circled around the awful, lingering dream. He couldn’t stop thinking about the end, those last few moments before he was mercifully torn from the nightmare and returned to consciousness. Through tears of terror and agony he saw a wide, frozen lake stretching out from the narrow cove where the woman lay broken upon the cracked ice. Above her, high bluffs and crowding trees. And something else, too, something big moving through the trees. A burning glow high up in the branches. An awful shriek. Then chaos. And more pain. She cried out for help, and although he was sure she must have been crying out to God on that bloody ice, a final, desperate prayer, he could’ve sworn that she was speaking to him. Don’t let it take me!He shuddered hard at those words, the final thing he’d heard before the dream shattered and ejected him back into his peaceful bedroom again. It wasn’t just a dream. It was real. That woman was real. The thing that was chasing her was real. Her sufferingwas real. But those events didn’t happen recently. That lake was deeply frozen. It was the middle of winter. It was now late April. That left one important question: Had the awful scene taken place in a winter past…or in a winter yet to be? He made his way downstairs, where he found Karen in the kitchen, already busying herself with her baking. She had four hundred cupcakes to bake for a wedding the next day. For most people, waiting until the morning before would be pushing it, but Karen was not most people. She was ridiculously talented in the kitchen and made a considerable amount of spending money as a freelance cake decorator and caterer. She was perfectly content to simply rise a little earlier than usual. “You’re up early,” she observed, barely sparing him a glance as she poured sugar into her mixer. Holly sat at the table, separating paper baking cups and slipping them into muffin pans. She turned and looked up at him, brushing her long, red hair from her pretty face and offering him her usual, sweet smile. “Good morning!” As always, she was exceedingly cheerful, as if she’d never been dealt a single reason to be anything but optimistic and full of hope.“Good morning,” he said to both of them as he poured himself a cup of coffee. “Did you have the dream again?” asked Karen. It wasn’t a secret. He hadn’t kept it from her. He neverkept things from her. Not for long. He might occasionally downplay just how much peril he’d found himself in, like that time he was shot at by a fat, psychotic cowboy. (It was better that she not know just how narrowly he’d escaped that encounter.) But he always told her the rest of it, regardless of how frightening or disturbing (or unflattering or embarrassing) his exploits might be. They were always honest with each other. “I did.”“So you’ll be leaving again?”“Looks like it.”To anyone who didn’t know her, she would have looked unnaturally calm, as if the idea of him venturing off on another of his weird adventures wasn’t the least bit terrifying to her. But Eric knew her far better than anyone. She wasn’t comfortable expressing her feelings. She bottled them up inside and put on false faces. It was an old coping mechanism that had served her through some rough adolescent years, and an apparently unbreakable habit even after all this time. Right now, she was feigning disinterest and a little bit of annoyance. He was about to go off on another stupid road trip to get himself hurt again. A silly boy and his silly adventures. But he knew that deep inside, in that fragile part of her that she kept locked up tight, she was very much afraid. “Do you know where you’re going?” she asked as she started up her mixer. “North,” he replied. “Just north?”“Just north.”“That’s not very specific.”Eric took a sip of his coffee and then cocked his head thoughtfully. “It’s pretty specific. When you get down to it. I mean, it’s precisely as specific as a compass needle.”“How far north?” she pressed. “Like, up north? In Northern Wisconsin? Upper Peninsula? Or are we talking Canada north? Or Santa’s workshop north?”“Can’t say. I guess I’ll know it when I get there.”“The lake,” agreed Holly as she continued prepping the muffin pans. “Where the people in the mist wander. With the beast with many names. And where the funny space men play with their toys.”Eric and Karen both looked at her, but she kept her eyes on the task before her, as if she hadn’t said anything strange at all. “Right…” said Karen. “There you go. Just look for all that stuff.”Eric nodded. “Yeah. That should narrow it down for me.”Holly smiled her sweet smile. “What does Isabelle say?” asked Karen. “That I should hurry.”“Definitely,” agreed Holly. “Something’s going to happen there. I can’t see what it is, but it’s going to be bad.” Eric had been lifting his cup to his lips, but he lowered it again without sipping. “How bad?”“Way bad.” “Can you give me an example of what ‘way bad’ might entail? I’m still a little hazy on just how bad things can actually get.”Holly set aside the prepared muffin pan and reached for the next one. She seemed surprisingly casual for someone discussing dire portents about his eminent journey. “It’s hard to say for sure. But I’m certain that anyone near that lake is in terrible danger.”Karen frowned at Holly. “One of your spells told you all this?”She nodded. Eric met Holly Shorring the previous summer. She was a member of a coven of witches who had sought his help against a powerful and murderous wizard who was hunting them down one by one. Although he hadn’t believed in magic when he met her, she and her sisters had thoroughly convinced him otherwise. (He didn’t understand it, but he absolutely believed in it.)Holly was young, only twenty, and strikingly beautiful. She also possessed a remarkably endearing personality. She was sweet, kind, resourceful and clever. Everyone who had met her since she moved to Creek Bend adored her. But when he first laid eyes on her, she was dancing provocatively on a stage in a nude bar in rural Illinois. Karen had been understandably irate about him returning home just prior to their wedding anniversary with a gorgeous, young stripper. And she still hadn’t let it go. Nor would she. Ever. She had no intention of letting him forget it as long as they both lived, regardless of how and why it happened. And he could hardly blame her. He knew perfectly well how fortunate he was to have survived that ordeal, and with all his bits and bobs intact, no less. At the same time, however, Karen had managed to harbor not a single ounce of ill will toward Holly. In fact, like everyone else, she’d quickly grown quite fond of the girl. She’d taken her under her wing and treated her like a member of the family almost from the start. Hardly a day went by when she wasn’t here in this kitchen, helping Karen with her baking, or out assisting with a delivery.Eric had long ago stopped trying to point out that if he’d never brought her home, Karen would have missed out on having such a dear friend enter her life. That was not the point. That had nothing to do with it. His crimes remained unforgiveable, regardless of her fondness for the very object of her insatiable wrath. (He’d also long since stopped trying to makes sense of the situation.)It didn’t hurt that Holly and Karen had turned out to have a lot in common. They were practically made to be best friends. They could’ve been long-lost sisters. For starters, Holly was a skilled baker in her own right. She had a particularly special talent for making cookies. Also, Holly had a peculiar way of encouraging people to be nice to her. It was a gift she possessed, a sort of psychic power of suggestion. She was a sweet girl who wanted everyone to like her, and so almost everyone who met her found her instantly endearing. (But Karen insisted that this curious ability had nothing to do with it, of course.)“Did your spells tell you anything else?” asked Eric. “Not that I could really understand,” she told him. “Not yet, anyway. Just random images. Nothing that makes much sense.”“I guess that explains the funny space men.”She shrugged her shoulders. “It’s all a little wonky. Maybe once you’re there it’ll be clearer. I’ll call you if I see anything else.”Karen cocked her head and tucked a strand of her brown hair behind her ear. “Wait… You’re not going with him?”“Not this time. The spell said he has to do this on his own.” “Oh…” Karen hadn’t intended to let her go without a fight. She’d made it her business to take care of the girl, after all. But she hadn’t expected to win that argument, much less that there would be no argument at all. Eric nodded. “Then that’s settled,” he decided. He was relieved, actually. As helpful as she’d be if he took her with him (she had saved his life more than once) he was thankful to not have to worry about her getting hurt. Especially since people always managed to get hurt on these weird adventures. “I should get going.”“Oh, and stay away from the water,” added Holly. “At least until I know more.” “No swimming,” confirmed Eric. “Got it.” “What’s wrong with the water?” asked Karen. “There’s blood in it,” replied Holly. Karen shook her head. “Why do I ask these things?” She turned to Eric, looking him over. “Maybe I should go with you.”“You’ve got too much to do,” he replied quickly, gesturing at the cupcakes. The last thing he wanted was for her to tag along. He’d never forgive himself if anything happened to her.“Jess would take over for me if I called her,” she reasoned. “You’d never trust anyone to take over one of your jobs,” he challenged. “Jess is very talented. I know she could handle it.” “You’d worry about it the whole time you were gone.”She knit her eyebrows. He was right, of course, but she wasn’t about to admit it. She took an enormous amount of pride in her work, especially when the job was for something as special as a wedding. It had nothing to do with how much she trusted anyone else to do the job. Once she’d made a commitment to do something, she always saw it through to the end. (Like when she committed herself to never letting him forget how he mucked up their last anniversary weekend.)“He has to do it on his own,” Holly explained. “Neither of us are supposed to go.”“There you go,” said Eric, trying not to sound too relieved. “Can’t argue with magic.”Karen fixed her eyes on Holly for a moment. Although her expression was only thoughtful, he thought he could almost see the real emotions swirling behind her dark eyes. She knew he was right. She couldn’t just abandon her responsibilities here. It was her job to make sure these cupcakes were finished, were beautiful, and were on display in the church before the guests began arriving tomorrow afternoon. It wasn’t even about the money she’d already been paid. It was about keeping her word and ensuring that her part of someone’s beautiful day was as perfect as she could make it. But she also didn’t care for being told what to do. If she wanted to accompany her husband into the unknown, why shouldn’t she be able to? It was also her responsibility to take care of him, to make sure he was safe. What kind of wife would she be if she didn’t do everything in her power to protect him? And this self-proclaimed witch had no business telling her otherwise. Yet the deepest truth of all was that while she was afraid for him, she was even more afraid to go with him. The things he’d described to her, the terrible things he’d seen… She was too cowardly to even sit through a horror movie, much less to live through one. The first time this happened, she didn’t believe it. She thought it was some kind of early mid-life crisis kind of episode, that he’d subconsciously begun to feel trapped in his mundane, English teacher existence and realized that he was only getting older. He just needed a little adventure to make him feel young again. Even when everything started getting weird and he began describing the insane things he was seeing over the phone, she didn’t really believe it. Not even when he began sending her pictures. She told herself it had to be a prank of some sort. At worst, she feared that he might be suffering a serious psychological break, but that was even more terrifying than the idea that all these things were real, so in the end, she’d just gone along with it, almost numb to it all. But it was real. And she had no idea how he kept doing these things. If she’d been with him when that first golem burst from the old wardrobe in that empty house… Well, she doubted very much that she would’ve handled it with half the bravado as her courageous husband (and he’d confidentially admitted to her that he pretty much just ran away screaming like a girl). And now Holly was telling her she wasn’t supposed to go… Finally, she let out an exasperated sigh and met his gaze again. “You be careful out there.”“I always am.”“No, you’re not. You’re always getting yourself bitten by things and falling from high places.”“I wouldn’t say ‘always’…”“Or getting sliced up by something with huge claws.”“But I always come home, remember?”She did remember. It was the one thing he brought back from his time with Holly’s coven that hadn’t earned him her fiery wrath: A prophecy of sorts. A magic spell had given him an assurance that although he would continue to be called away on these strange journeys, he would always return to her. It was a heartening message and it helped to ease her fears. But only a little. “I still don’t know how much I trust this witchcraft stuff,” she told him. Eric glanced at Holly. He recalled his brief time with the coven the previous July, all that he went through, all that he saw. “I trust hermagic,” he told her. And it was the truth.Karen stared thoughtfully at him and said nothing. Though Holly had offered to teach her to use spells, too, she’d refused. In fact, she’d discouraged the girl from using any magic while she lived in Creek Bend. It wasn’t that she disapproved, exactly. After all, this magic had saved her husband’s life. But she found the very concept difficult to handle. It seemed so unnatural. Holly hadn’t pushed the matter. After all, she hardly needed to rely on witchcraft in her everyday life. A man she called “Grandpa,” but who wasn’t a father to either of her parents, had long ago taught her that magic wasn’t something one relied on for just anything. It was only for emergencies. Or special circumstances. Like these dreams Eric was having, for example. “Paul won’t be able to help this time,” said Karen. “I know.” Paul was his older brother. Usually, Karen would call him soon after Eric left and send him to keep an eye on her wayward husband. But today Paul, his wife, Monica, and his son, Kevin, were in Minnesota for a wedding. “It doesn’t matter. He wasn’t much help last time, remember.”“That wasn’t his fault.”“I know. But I still don’t need him.” In fact, he’d prefer that Paul, like Karen and Holly, stay well away from whatever bizarre trouble he was heading into. It was hard enough worrying about his own ass out there, without having to be concerned about someone else’s safety. “Have Isabelle keep me posted.” “She will.”She gave him a kiss and then turned back to her mixing bowls. “Well, get going. You wouldn’t want to be late for whatever trouble you’re about to get yourself into.”She was good. He could almost believe she really wasn’t concerned about him. Eric snatched up his keys. “No. I guess I wouldn’t.”“I love you. Be careful.”“I love you, too,” he assured her. He headed for the door. “Good luck,” said Holly. “Thanks.”As he opened the door, Karen added, “And try not to bring home any more strippers, ‘kay?”
Rushed: Hedge Lake is available for preorder at Amazon and Smashwords.
Get the whole book on December 11!
April 21, 2014
By the Pricking of My Thumbs...
Something Wicked this way comes! Look for the third book in the Rushed series to be available around the first of May! This time around, Eric finds himself summoned to the aid of a coven of witches who are being hunted by a murderous magic man. The usual monsters and mayhem are waiting for him in the rural farmlands of Southern Illinois, but the real peril may lie at home, because if he's not back in time for the anniversary getaway Karen has planned for them, he's going to learn the true definition of terror...
Continue reading for a sneak peek of the first chapter of Rushed: Something Wicked
And if you haven't checked out the first two books yet, look for Rushed and Rushed: The Unseen wherever you like to buy your ebooks!
Chapter One
“I want to go to that seafood restaurant again. The one with the all-you-can-eat crab legs?”
Eric nodded. “I remember it.”
“It was so good.”
“It was pricy.” He sat at the table, finishing up his coffee and watching his wife as she fluttered around the kitchen, cleaning up after breakfast.
“It was worth it,” she purred.
He supposed it was. Karen loved crab legs. It was one of her favorites. It made her happy.
“And that little fudge shop!”
“Can’t miss the fudge.” He finished his coffee and handed her his cup. He didn’t offer to help. He knew better. He’d just be in the way. The kitchen was Karen’s domain. She’d long ago claimed it as her own and now ruled it with the authority and grace of a queen. He’d given up trying to be helpful in here. No matter how hard he tried, he just couldn’t seem to get the dishes clean enough to please her, or put them away in just the right places. Everything had to remain immaculately clean and tidy. There was a place for everything and everything was always in its place. Though you wouldn’t know it by the state of her disorganized closet or the chaotic mess that was her bathroom counter, in this room, nothing short of perfection would do.
He was equally useless when it came to cooking. He could barely make toast right. Any attempt he made to help her prepare food only slowed her down. The only thing he was good for in this room was retrieving things off the high shelves where she couldn’t reach. (And being somewhat shorter than average, he couldn’t even do that half the time without a stepstool.)
If he was a good boy and just sat quietly and stayed out of her way, she’d let him stay. Otherwise, she was likely to shoo him out of the room like a troublesome child until she was done.
Luckily, he remained useful throughout the rest of the house. He did a satisfactory job with the laundry and could fix most things when they broke. He managed the bills and mowed the lawn and shoveled the driveway. He earned his keep.
And of course he was the killer of the spiders. If nothing else at all, she’d keep him around just for that. Although she occasionally reminded him that lots of younger, fitter men could kill spiders too, just to keep him on his toes.
“We should take one of those dinner cruises on the lake, too,” she sighed. “Doesn’t that sound nice?”
“Sounds expensive.”
She shot him a sour look. “Don’t be cheap. It’s our anniversary.”
“I’m not being cheap. I’m just being realistic. We spent a little extra last year because it was our ten-year anniversary. I don’t think we should get too carried away this year.”
She turned and leaned her back against the counter, pouting. “Eleven years is better than ten. Why shouldn’t we do it bigger this year?”
Eric smiled and let his eyes wash over her. She was wearing an oversized Packers tee shirt that barely covered her bottom and nothing more. Her long, brown hair spilled down over her shoulders, still disheveled from bed.
Eleven years ago, when they walked down the aisle, she was much slimmer, but he didn’t miss that tiny silhouette one bit. Borderline anorexic, she’d spent the previous seven years starving herself and desperately trying to climb out of her popular, prom queen older sister’s shadow. About the time he proposed to her (never because she was thin and beautiful, but because she was simply beautiful inside and out) she began to accept who she was and that she didn’t have to be anyone else. She allowed herself to gain back some of that middle-school weight that she’d hated so much and the result, Eric thought, was breathtaking. To this day, she remained exquisitely curvy and, in his opinion, extraordinarily sexy.
And as he sat staring at her now, he found that he really didn’t want to discuss their upcoming romantic getaway.
“What do you want to do?” she asked him.
Eric stood up and strolled around the table to where she stood. “I just want to be with you,” he told her, and then kissed her lips.
“Charming,” she said, smiling. “But you can be with me any day. What do you want to do this weekend?”
Eric kissed her cheek and then her neck. “I’ve got a few ideas,” he assured her as he slid his hands down the sultry curves of her waist and slipped them under the hem of the tee shirt.
“Whoa,” she said, pushing his hands away. “Down boy. We’re talking about our anniversary trip now.”
“We are,” he agreed, nipping at her ear. “It’s just a little preview.”
She pulled away from him and pushed his hands out from under her shirt again. “We’re not spending four hundred a night just to stay in the hotel room and play naughty nurse.”
Eric stood up straighter, his eyebrows raised. “Naughty nurse? Did you buy a new outfit?”
Karen pushed him, barely stifling a smile. “I was being sarcastic.”
He frowned. “So…no naughty nurse?”
“No. I’m not going away for the weekend just to play dress up for you.”
“I don’t understand. We’ll pay four hundred a night just to sleep somewhere, but not to—”
“Exactly. Yes. So no naughty anything.”
Eric kissed her again. “Well there’s always the French Maid.”
“I never should’ve let you talk me into buying that.”
“But you did.”
“I did. But I’m not packing it.”
“Aw. Why not?”
“This is our anniversary weekend. It’s not about you.”
He leaned back and looked at her, his eyes narrowed. “Not about me, huh?”
“Not about you,” she insisted. “It’s about me.”
“Why is it about you?”
“I’m your wife. That’s the way it is. Ask anyone.”
Again, he kissed her on the neck. This time she didn’t pull away.
“We still have to decide what all we’re doing this weekend.”
“We will. It’s only Wednesday. We don’t leave until Friday.” He slid his hands up under her shirt again and grasped her naked hips beneath it. She didn’t push his hands away.
“But I have so much to do before we leave,” she protested, even as she lifted her chin to let him kiss her neck. “I promised to make cookies for the church ice cream social. And I promised Shana Lesternap a dozen pies for the firehouse picnic.”
“Plenty of time,” Eric assured her.
“I have to get it all done by tomorrow evening.”
“No problem for Creek Bend’s resident culinary genius.”
“Now you’re just sucking up.”
“Maybe. But you’re still the most talented woman I’ve ever known.”
Karen made a fair amount of money as a freelance baker and cake decorator. It was rare for a social event to take place in this town without something delicious made in this very kitchen.
“You promise to help me plan?”
He continued to kiss her neck. “Of course I do.”
“You’d better.”
Eric kissed her lips again.
She kissed him back.
He thought it was going to be a very good day.
Then the damn doorbell rang.
“You’ve got to be freaking kidding me,” grumbled Eric, his voice muffled against his wife’s probing lips.
She giggled and kissed him again.
He didn’t want to stop. He squeezed her bottom and pulled her closer, kissing her harder.
Again, the doorbell rang.
Karen laughed. “Get the door, stud.”
“They’ll go away.”
She pushed him away. “Just get the door.”
Eric sighed and turned away.
Whoever was at the door began knocking.
“This’d better be really important!”
Behind him, Karen laughed again.
When he opened the door, Eric found a teenage boy with tousled black hair and hauntingly dark eyes staring back at him. He was dressed in a too-big tee shirt, torn blue jeans and worn-out tennis shoes.
“Are you Eric Fortrell?” the boy asked.
Eric wanted badly to lie, but he nodded.
“I’m Jude Thorngood, sir. We need your help.”
I’m sure you do, thought Eric. These kids tended to show up several times a year, typically selling candy bars, cookies or coupon books. Occasionally magazine subscriptions. Usually not so early in the day, though… He never bought anything. He was a teacher at the local high school. He already participated in more than his share of fundraisers. “Sorry, this really isn’t a good time.”
But the kid was more persistent than others. He stepped forward, his hand outstretched, pleading with him. “There isn’tany more time, sir.”
Dramatic, he thought. This kid really took his fundraising seriously. “Maybe you could come back later. I’m in the middle of something really important right now.” He glanced back toward the kitchen. He really wanted to be in there with Karen.
“This is important.”
“I’m sure it is.”
“Just a few minutes of your time. Please.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m really busy.”
“You have to listen…” But Eric was already shutting the door. He had no intention of listening to a teenage boy try to convince him that his football team needed new practice jerseys (or whatever it was he was out begging for). He volunteered for enough bake sales and dances and car washes that he did not feel the need to humor these kids on his own front porch.
And yet, they still always managed to make him feel guilty when he said no. He stood there for a moment, his hand resting on the doorknob, annoyed. Then he turned away from the door and started across the living room. He’d gone as far as the couch when he heard Karen scream in the kitchen, startling him. As he bolted from the living room to see what was wrong, he heard her shout again, this time shrieking his name.
He’d always had a very vivid imagination. It was the foundation on which he’d built his love of reading that turned into a love of literature and led him to becoming an English teacher. He could always slip into those other worlds, immersing himself in Tolkien’s Middle-earth or Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. Unfortunately, it had a side-effect of offering him the most terrifying of scenarios during moments like these. As a result, it was far too easy to picture Karen in the kitchen with her hand lodged in the garbage disposal or her foot crushed under the weight of a frozen turkey.
How a bright woman like Karen might come to be in such situations was well beyond him, but he never claimed that his too-vivid imagination was in any way logical.
Fortunately, Karen was not in mortal peril. He burst into the kitchen to find the boy he’d just closed the front door on sitting at the table, staring at her, a bright smile on his face. She stood with her back against the sink, her eyes wide. She was pulling down the hem of the Packers tee shirt with one hand and covering the more than generous amount of cleavage revealed by doing this with the other. She looked both mortified and infuriated.
Eric didn’t take the time to wonder how the boy had managed to get inside the house. He rushed to the table and hauled him out of the chair by his arm.
“Ow.”
“Who the hell is he?” demanded Karen. “Why is he looking at me half naked?”
“I don’t know! I didn’t let him in!”
“Get him out!”
“I am!” He was already steering the boy down the hallway as Karen bolted out of the kitchen and up the stairs, slamming the bedroom door behind her.
Jude craned his neck as far as it would go to watch her leave and then looked up at Eric, grinning. “Your wife’s really pretty.”
“Shut up, you. I ought to kick your ass.”
“I need to talk to you.”
“I told you I was busy!” Although he wasn’t likely to be busy now. Thanks to this stupid stunt, he was sure he wasn’t going to be “busy” for quite a while. “I should call the cops is what I should—” When he looked down, however, he realized that he was no longer holding the boy’s arm. He was gone.
He turned and found him sitting in the kitchen chair again, his arms folded casually on the table, smiling back at him.
“How the hell…?”
“You can’t get rid of me. We need your help and I can’t leave until you’ve heard what I have to say.”
Upstairs Eric heard the closet door slam. He needed to get this kid out of the house now or they were both going to catch hell. “Fine,” he sighed. “But outside.”
That, it seemed, was satisfactory. Still smiling at him, the teenage boy who ruined Eric’s perfectly nice morning stood up and followed him out onto the porch.
“Now what the hell is so damn important that it just couldn’t wait?” snapped Eric. He wasn’t remotely concerned about offending a student. It was clear by now that this had nothing at all to do with any kind of school fundraising.
The boy didn’t waste any time. “It’s my mom. Someone’s trying to kill her.”
Eric stood there for a moment, staring at him, trying to wrap his head around what he’d just heard. “What?”
“He’s already killed Grandpa. We didn’t think it was possible, but he did it.”
“Wait… Somebody killed your grandpa?”
The boy nodded. “And one of the girls, too. Regina. He’ll kill us all before he’s done. We need your help. Desperately.”
Eric felt a hot lump forming in his belly. Was this kid really talking about murder? Was somebody hunting down members of his family? “Shouldn’t you be talking to the police?” But he found that he already knew what the boy’s response to this was going to be.
“Police can’t help. If Grandpa couldn’t stop him, they wouldn’t have a chance, even if they would help.”
Eric knew the answer to his next question, too, but he asked it anyway: “Why wouldn’t they help you?”
“They’d never believe us.”
Of course they wouldn’t.
“He won’t stop until he kills all of us.”
“Who’s ‘he?’”
“The magic man.”
“Magic man?” This all sounded crazy, but the craziest part was that it all made a certain kind of sense. None of this was any less believable than some of the things he’d already seen. He sat down on the porch steps and ran his hands through his hair, frustrated. “And you think I can help you?”
Jude stood over him, staring at him with those dark, pleading eyes. “You’re the only one. Mom said so. And she’s never wrong.”
Now Eric’s palms were firmly planted against his eyes. It was happening again. And just before his wedding anniversary, no less.
“She sent me to find you and bring you back with me.”
“Where?”
“We’re hiding out on a farm in Illinois.”
“Illinois…” sighed Eric. “Fantastic.”
This had happened twice before. Not exactly like this, of course. But it had happened. Once last summer and then again just last month. He already knew that much more than just his morning had been ruined.
“Please,” begged Jude. “You have to help us.”
Eric dropped his hands and stared up at the boy.
“We don’t stand a chance against him without you.”
Look for Something Wicked at your favorite ebook retailer on May 1st! Happy reading, everybody!
Continue reading for a sneak peek of the first chapter of Rushed: Something Wicked
And if you haven't checked out the first two books yet, look for Rushed and Rushed: The Unseen wherever you like to buy your ebooks!
Chapter One
“I want to go to that seafood restaurant again. The one with the all-you-can-eat crab legs?”
Eric nodded. “I remember it.”
“It was so good.”
“It was pricy.” He sat at the table, finishing up his coffee and watching his wife as she fluttered around the kitchen, cleaning up after breakfast.
“It was worth it,” she purred.
He supposed it was. Karen loved crab legs. It was one of her favorites. It made her happy.
“And that little fudge shop!”
“Can’t miss the fudge.” He finished his coffee and handed her his cup. He didn’t offer to help. He knew better. He’d just be in the way. The kitchen was Karen’s domain. She’d long ago claimed it as her own and now ruled it with the authority and grace of a queen. He’d given up trying to be helpful in here. No matter how hard he tried, he just couldn’t seem to get the dishes clean enough to please her, or put them away in just the right places. Everything had to remain immaculately clean and tidy. There was a place for everything and everything was always in its place. Though you wouldn’t know it by the state of her disorganized closet or the chaotic mess that was her bathroom counter, in this room, nothing short of perfection would do.
He was equally useless when it came to cooking. He could barely make toast right. Any attempt he made to help her prepare food only slowed her down. The only thing he was good for in this room was retrieving things off the high shelves where she couldn’t reach. (And being somewhat shorter than average, he couldn’t even do that half the time without a stepstool.)
If he was a good boy and just sat quietly and stayed out of her way, she’d let him stay. Otherwise, she was likely to shoo him out of the room like a troublesome child until she was done.
Luckily, he remained useful throughout the rest of the house. He did a satisfactory job with the laundry and could fix most things when they broke. He managed the bills and mowed the lawn and shoveled the driveway. He earned his keep.
And of course he was the killer of the spiders. If nothing else at all, she’d keep him around just for that. Although she occasionally reminded him that lots of younger, fitter men could kill spiders too, just to keep him on his toes.
“We should take one of those dinner cruises on the lake, too,” she sighed. “Doesn’t that sound nice?”
“Sounds expensive.”
She shot him a sour look. “Don’t be cheap. It’s our anniversary.”
“I’m not being cheap. I’m just being realistic. We spent a little extra last year because it was our ten-year anniversary. I don’t think we should get too carried away this year.”
She turned and leaned her back against the counter, pouting. “Eleven years is better than ten. Why shouldn’t we do it bigger this year?”
Eric smiled and let his eyes wash over her. She was wearing an oversized Packers tee shirt that barely covered her bottom and nothing more. Her long, brown hair spilled down over her shoulders, still disheveled from bed.
Eleven years ago, when they walked down the aisle, she was much slimmer, but he didn’t miss that tiny silhouette one bit. Borderline anorexic, she’d spent the previous seven years starving herself and desperately trying to climb out of her popular, prom queen older sister’s shadow. About the time he proposed to her (never because she was thin and beautiful, but because she was simply beautiful inside and out) she began to accept who she was and that she didn’t have to be anyone else. She allowed herself to gain back some of that middle-school weight that she’d hated so much and the result, Eric thought, was breathtaking. To this day, she remained exquisitely curvy and, in his opinion, extraordinarily sexy.
And as he sat staring at her now, he found that he really didn’t want to discuss their upcoming romantic getaway.
“What do you want to do?” she asked him.
Eric stood up and strolled around the table to where she stood. “I just want to be with you,” he told her, and then kissed her lips.
“Charming,” she said, smiling. “But you can be with me any day. What do you want to do this weekend?”
Eric kissed her cheek and then her neck. “I’ve got a few ideas,” he assured her as he slid his hands down the sultry curves of her waist and slipped them under the hem of the tee shirt.
“Whoa,” she said, pushing his hands away. “Down boy. We’re talking about our anniversary trip now.”
“We are,” he agreed, nipping at her ear. “It’s just a little preview.”
She pulled away from him and pushed his hands out from under her shirt again. “We’re not spending four hundred a night just to stay in the hotel room and play naughty nurse.”
Eric stood up straighter, his eyebrows raised. “Naughty nurse? Did you buy a new outfit?”
Karen pushed him, barely stifling a smile. “I was being sarcastic.”
He frowned. “So…no naughty nurse?”
“No. I’m not going away for the weekend just to play dress up for you.”
“I don’t understand. We’ll pay four hundred a night just to sleep somewhere, but not to—”
“Exactly. Yes. So no naughty anything.”
Eric kissed her again. “Well there’s always the French Maid.”
“I never should’ve let you talk me into buying that.”
“But you did.”
“I did. But I’m not packing it.”
“Aw. Why not?”
“This is our anniversary weekend. It’s not about you.”
He leaned back and looked at her, his eyes narrowed. “Not about me, huh?”
“Not about you,” she insisted. “It’s about me.”
“Why is it about you?”
“I’m your wife. That’s the way it is. Ask anyone.”
Again, he kissed her on the neck. This time she didn’t pull away.
“We still have to decide what all we’re doing this weekend.”
“We will. It’s only Wednesday. We don’t leave until Friday.” He slid his hands up under her shirt again and grasped her naked hips beneath it. She didn’t push his hands away.
“But I have so much to do before we leave,” she protested, even as she lifted her chin to let him kiss her neck. “I promised to make cookies for the church ice cream social. And I promised Shana Lesternap a dozen pies for the firehouse picnic.”
“Plenty of time,” Eric assured her.
“I have to get it all done by tomorrow evening.”
“No problem for Creek Bend’s resident culinary genius.”
“Now you’re just sucking up.”
“Maybe. But you’re still the most talented woman I’ve ever known.”
Karen made a fair amount of money as a freelance baker and cake decorator. It was rare for a social event to take place in this town without something delicious made in this very kitchen.
“You promise to help me plan?”
He continued to kiss her neck. “Of course I do.”
“You’d better.”
Eric kissed her lips again.
She kissed him back.
He thought it was going to be a very good day.
Then the damn doorbell rang.
“You’ve got to be freaking kidding me,” grumbled Eric, his voice muffled against his wife’s probing lips.
She giggled and kissed him again.
He didn’t want to stop. He squeezed her bottom and pulled her closer, kissing her harder.
Again, the doorbell rang.
Karen laughed. “Get the door, stud.”
“They’ll go away.”
She pushed him away. “Just get the door.”
Eric sighed and turned away.
Whoever was at the door began knocking.
“This’d better be really important!”
Behind him, Karen laughed again.
When he opened the door, Eric found a teenage boy with tousled black hair and hauntingly dark eyes staring back at him. He was dressed in a too-big tee shirt, torn blue jeans and worn-out tennis shoes.
“Are you Eric Fortrell?” the boy asked.
Eric wanted badly to lie, but he nodded.
“I’m Jude Thorngood, sir. We need your help.”
I’m sure you do, thought Eric. These kids tended to show up several times a year, typically selling candy bars, cookies or coupon books. Occasionally magazine subscriptions. Usually not so early in the day, though… He never bought anything. He was a teacher at the local high school. He already participated in more than his share of fundraisers. “Sorry, this really isn’t a good time.”
But the kid was more persistent than others. He stepped forward, his hand outstretched, pleading with him. “There isn’tany more time, sir.”
Dramatic, he thought. This kid really took his fundraising seriously. “Maybe you could come back later. I’m in the middle of something really important right now.” He glanced back toward the kitchen. He really wanted to be in there with Karen.
“This is important.”
“I’m sure it is.”
“Just a few minutes of your time. Please.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m really busy.”
“You have to listen…” But Eric was already shutting the door. He had no intention of listening to a teenage boy try to convince him that his football team needed new practice jerseys (or whatever it was he was out begging for). He volunteered for enough bake sales and dances and car washes that he did not feel the need to humor these kids on his own front porch.
And yet, they still always managed to make him feel guilty when he said no. He stood there for a moment, his hand resting on the doorknob, annoyed. Then he turned away from the door and started across the living room. He’d gone as far as the couch when he heard Karen scream in the kitchen, startling him. As he bolted from the living room to see what was wrong, he heard her shout again, this time shrieking his name.
He’d always had a very vivid imagination. It was the foundation on which he’d built his love of reading that turned into a love of literature and led him to becoming an English teacher. He could always slip into those other worlds, immersing himself in Tolkien’s Middle-earth or Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. Unfortunately, it had a side-effect of offering him the most terrifying of scenarios during moments like these. As a result, it was far too easy to picture Karen in the kitchen with her hand lodged in the garbage disposal or her foot crushed under the weight of a frozen turkey.
How a bright woman like Karen might come to be in such situations was well beyond him, but he never claimed that his too-vivid imagination was in any way logical.
Fortunately, Karen was not in mortal peril. He burst into the kitchen to find the boy he’d just closed the front door on sitting at the table, staring at her, a bright smile on his face. She stood with her back against the sink, her eyes wide. She was pulling down the hem of the Packers tee shirt with one hand and covering the more than generous amount of cleavage revealed by doing this with the other. She looked both mortified and infuriated.
Eric didn’t take the time to wonder how the boy had managed to get inside the house. He rushed to the table and hauled him out of the chair by his arm.
“Ow.”
“Who the hell is he?” demanded Karen. “Why is he looking at me half naked?”
“I don’t know! I didn’t let him in!”
“Get him out!”
“I am!” He was already steering the boy down the hallway as Karen bolted out of the kitchen and up the stairs, slamming the bedroom door behind her.
Jude craned his neck as far as it would go to watch her leave and then looked up at Eric, grinning. “Your wife’s really pretty.”
“Shut up, you. I ought to kick your ass.”
“I need to talk to you.”
“I told you I was busy!” Although he wasn’t likely to be busy now. Thanks to this stupid stunt, he was sure he wasn’t going to be “busy” for quite a while. “I should call the cops is what I should—” When he looked down, however, he realized that he was no longer holding the boy’s arm. He was gone.
He turned and found him sitting in the kitchen chair again, his arms folded casually on the table, smiling back at him.
“How the hell…?”
“You can’t get rid of me. We need your help and I can’t leave until you’ve heard what I have to say.”
Upstairs Eric heard the closet door slam. He needed to get this kid out of the house now or they were both going to catch hell. “Fine,” he sighed. “But outside.”
That, it seemed, was satisfactory. Still smiling at him, the teenage boy who ruined Eric’s perfectly nice morning stood up and followed him out onto the porch.
“Now what the hell is so damn important that it just couldn’t wait?” snapped Eric. He wasn’t remotely concerned about offending a student. It was clear by now that this had nothing at all to do with any kind of school fundraising.
The boy didn’t waste any time. “It’s my mom. Someone’s trying to kill her.”
Eric stood there for a moment, staring at him, trying to wrap his head around what he’d just heard. “What?”
“He’s already killed Grandpa. We didn’t think it was possible, but he did it.”
“Wait… Somebody killed your grandpa?”
The boy nodded. “And one of the girls, too. Regina. He’ll kill us all before he’s done. We need your help. Desperately.”
Eric felt a hot lump forming in his belly. Was this kid really talking about murder? Was somebody hunting down members of his family? “Shouldn’t you be talking to the police?” But he found that he already knew what the boy’s response to this was going to be.
“Police can’t help. If Grandpa couldn’t stop him, they wouldn’t have a chance, even if they would help.”
Eric knew the answer to his next question, too, but he asked it anyway: “Why wouldn’t they help you?”
“They’d never believe us.”
Of course they wouldn’t.
“He won’t stop until he kills all of us.”
“Who’s ‘he?’”
“The magic man.”
“Magic man?” This all sounded crazy, but the craziest part was that it all made a certain kind of sense. None of this was any less believable than some of the things he’d already seen. He sat down on the porch steps and ran his hands through his hair, frustrated. “And you think I can help you?”
Jude stood over him, staring at him with those dark, pleading eyes. “You’re the only one. Mom said so. And she’s never wrong.”
Now Eric’s palms were firmly planted against his eyes. It was happening again. And just before his wedding anniversary, no less.
“She sent me to find you and bring you back with me.”
“Where?”
“We’re hiding out on a farm in Illinois.”
“Illinois…” sighed Eric. “Fantastic.”
This had happened twice before. Not exactly like this, of course. But it had happened. Once last summer and then again just last month. He already knew that much more than just his morning had been ruined.
“Please,” begged Jude. “You have to help us.”
Eric dropped his hands and stared up at the boy.
“We don’t stand a chance against him without you.”
Look for Something Wicked at your favorite ebook retailer on May 1st! Happy reading, everybody!
November 13, 2013
Rushed: The Unseen
The second book in the Rushed series is almost here! Join Eric Fortrell as he discovers that the Bizarre adventure through the mysterious and terrifying fissure the previous year was only the beginning.
Rushed: The Unseen should be available in December. For a preview of the fun to come, just keep reading. What follows is the entire first chapter.
CHAPTER ONE
Two dozen pink Gerbera daisies.
Hailey’s favorite.
The girl at the flower shop smiled too much. Eric found it distracting.
It wasn’t an unkind smile. It
wasn’t even that there was nothing to smile about. It wasn’t a solemn occasion. The flowers weren’t for a funeral. Precisely the opposite, as a matter of
fact. They were for a baby shower. A celebration of happy expectations. The joyfully imminent arrival of a beautiful,
baby girl. There was no reason not to smile, really…but it felt a
little bit like she was laughing at him.
As she swiped his card, he eyed the bouquet. It was bigger than he’d expected. And so brightly colored… He might as well walk out of the store with
an armload of lit sparklers.
It was a silly thing, really.
Stupid, even. Just some childish
streak of macho pride nagging at him, asking him if he really intended to be
seen in broad daylight cradling this big, pink bouquet of daisies.
It didn’t help that the girl was so young. She looked about the same age as his high
school students, barely old enough to drive a car. And it never failed to impress him how cruel
kids could be at that age, how easy it was for them to ridicule others. And they could be especially mean-spirited
toward adults. At that age, looking out
at the world, you knew everything.
Looking back from that world, from
the other side of Eric’s thirty-two years, it was obvious that you really didn’t
know anything. Those differing
perceptions, from two completely opposing perspectives, sometimes made it
difficult to communicate. It created a
gap between them, a fissure of sorts.
Eric knew a thing or two about fissures.
His phone came to life in his pocket, buzzing urgently against his
thigh. That would be Karen. Again.
Begrudgingly, he fished the annoying device from the depths of his front
jeans pocket and answered it: “Hello?”
“Did you get the flowers?”
“Paying for them now.”
“How do they look?”
“Very pink.”
The girl’s smile broadened. It
looked warmer now, friendlier, less mocking.
Perhaps it really had all been in his imagination.
“Hailey’ll love them. Don’t you
think?”
“Definitely. Nothing celebrates a
new life like decapitating some pretty plants.”
The girl giggled a little at this as she handed him back his debit card.
“Out with the old, in with the new,” declared Karen.
“One way of putting it, I guess.”
Eric punched in his PIN number and asked, “How are the cupcakes coming?”
“First batch is done.”
“Awesome. You girls having
fun?”
“Yes, we are.”
“That’s good.”
Eric returned his card to his wallet and lifted the bouquet off the
counter. How was he supposed to even
hold this stupid thing? They looked so
delicate, yet they were heavy enough to demand a firm grip. And while he was talking on the phone, he
couldn’t even handle them with both hands.
He’d never really developed that knack for holding the phone in the
crook of his neck like other people. He
always dropped the damned thing.
Maybe he had an abnormal neck.
He hated cell phones. He hated the
way people were always talking on them, as if everything they had to say was
far too important to wait until they returned home. Talking and talking and talking, in their
cars, at restaurants, while checking out in stores…like he was doing now… But Karen insisted he carry one. She was a firm believer that everyone should
have one on them at all times. In case
of emergency. Or, you know, in case she
just wanted to talk to her husband right
now.
Personally, he’d rather just ignore the stupid thing. But if there was one thing he’d learned as
Karen’s loving and devoted husband, it was that she hated for her calls to be ignored.
“Diane keeps asking me to have you bring home tequila, though.”
“That doesn’t seem like a good idea.
Won’t the cupcakes get more lopsided as you go?”
“That’s what I keep telling her.”
From the background, Eric heard Diane say, “Everything’s more fun with
margaritas.”
Eric smiled at this. “She does
have a point.”
“Don’t encourage her.”
Karen met Diane Shucker at college, where they were roommates. They’d been best friends ever since. Today, Diane was helping prepare for the
shower. Although Eric had noticed on
previous occasions like this one that “helping” usually meant little more than
keeping her company. Karen always did
the vast majority of the work. Diane
would hand her things and help keep the kitchen tidy, but she would mostly just
sit with her, the two of them gossiping and giggling like schoolgirls.
Karen earned a fair amount of spending money as a freelance cake
decorator and caterer. Her cakes, pies
and cookies had won awards at every county fair for the past six years. As a result, she spent most Fridays and
Saturdays in the kitchen, preparing for one gathering or another.
Eric thought she should just open a business and hire some real help, but
she didn’t care at all for the idea of turning her hobby into a career. She was convinced it would take all the fun
out of it, and he supposed she might be right about that.
Satisfied that the bouquet wasn’t going to topple out of his grip, Eric
nodded goodbye to the overly-smiley, too-young florist and quickly made for the
door.
“I just got off the phone with Hailey, actually,” Karen informed
him.
“Oh yeah? How is she today?”
“Good. Her family got here last
night.” Hailey was his and Karen’s
sister-in-law. Her husband, Andrew, was
Karen’s baby brother. This would be
their first child, and the first grandchild for Hailey’s parents. It was a big event for the entire
family. They drove all the way down from
Northern Minnesota for this shower.
“That’s good.”
“It is. But they all showed up.”
“Uh oh.” Eric stepped out into the
warm sunshine and squinted at the surrounding street. He didn’t see anyone staring at him with one
of those stupid smiles, but there was plenty of ground to cover between him and
his silver PT Cruiser.
“Uh huh.” They’d only been expecting
Hailey’s parents and maybe an aunt or two.
“So I’m going to need you to bring home some more sparkling juice.”
“Sounds like a wild time. Red or
white?”
“Both. About four more bottles, I
think.”
“Each?”
“No. Four total. Two of each should do it.”
“That going to be enough?”
“I think so. Sounds like her dad
and uncles brought down enough beer to show the whole town a good time.”
“Now you’re talking.”
“Right.” He knew she was rolling
her eyes. It was a baby shower, not a
wedding reception. She hadn’t planned on
having any alcohol. She stood firmly by
her assertion that it simply wouldn’t be fair to the expectant mother. And he certainly couldn’t argue with
that. He wouldn’t want to be thrown a
party where he was the only one not allowed to drink.
Eric made it to the PT Cruiser without attracting a crowd and stopped as
he realized that he now had no idea how he was going to dig the keys out of his
pocket to unlock it.
So close to sanctuary…
“Anything else?”
Karen took a moment to think it over.
Eric wondered if she was doing it on purpose. “I don’t think so,” she decided at last.
“Okay. I’ll see you in a little
bit, then.”
“’Kay. Bye.”
Eric said goodbye and hung up. He
shoved the phone back into his left, front pocket and then awkwardly shifted
the bouquet to his left hand so he could retrieve the keys from his right, front pocket. A light breeze blew past him, threatening to
unbalance the daisies, and he had to rest them gently against the side of the
vehicle to keep from dropping them.
Once the keys were in his hand, he unlocked the PT Cruiser and glanced
around one last time. Still, nobody
seemed to be staring at him. Nobody he
could see, at least. That silly part of
his brain was convinced that there were dozens of laughing eyes hidden behind
all those store windows. But the only
person he saw was a man in a navy blue hoodie hurrying across the street with a
paper grocery sack in his arms.
Something about this man seemed curious.
Perhaps it was the hoodie. It
wasn’t sweltering out, but it was
early June and plenty warm enough for shorts and tee shirts.
Eric watched this man as he hurried into a narrow alley between two
buildings. There, just beyond the
sidewalk, he turned to look back the way he came, pulling down his hood as he
did, allowing an unobstructed view of his face.
Immediately, the big, pink bouquet was forgotten. Here, right before his eyes, was a face he
hadn’t seen in over six years. In fact,
as far as he knew, no one had seen
this face in over six years.
Aiden…?
The young man turned and scanned the street and sidewalk until his eyes
met Eric’s. Instantly, surprise washed
over him. Then panic. He turned and bolted deeper into the alley
and out of sight.
Eric hurried after him, but by the time he entered the alley, Aiden (if
it really was Aiden) was gone.
A high, chain link fence blocked the back of the alley. It was old and flimsy and didn’t look like it
would stop anyone sufficiently determined to pass through it, but it should
have been enough to slow someone down.
And Aiden hadn’t been out of sight for more than a few seconds.
On the left side of the alley, between him and the fence, a door stood
ajar. It was much more likely that he’d
gone in there.
Cradling the flowers in his arms, Eric walked to this door and opened it
wide. It didn’t close. There was no latch and no lock. It swung freely on its creaky hinges,
practically useless. Inside was darkness
and silence. A shadowy set of stairs led
up to a second floor landing.
He hesitated. He didn’t like
this. He felt like a child standing at
the front gate of a haunted house. And
he had every reason to be apprehensive.
He’d done this sort of thing before.
And unlike when he was a child, he knew first-hand that monsters were
real.
He glanced around once more, but this seemed to be the only place the
mysterious young man could have gone.
He didn’t have to do this. He
could walk away. He could just go
home. But… What if it really was Aiden?
Was it possible? After all this
time?
If it was him, he couldn’t just
leave. It would haunt him for the rest
of his life. Aiden Chadwick was one of this
city’s greatest unsolved mysteries.
He looked back up into the shadows at the top of the steps and took a
deep breath. “Don’t worry,” he said to
himself. “You brought flowers. What could go wrong?”
But that was a poor choice of words.
He’d always possessed a very vivid imagination and it was quick to bring
to mind several ghoulish examples of how things could go very, very wrong.
Mentally bracing himself, he stepped through the doorway and began to
climb the stairs. It was dusty in
here. The paint was peeling from the
walls. The handrail was coming
loose.
What building was this? The bakery
was next to the florist. Then that
little pet grooming shop, Sheltie’s. Was
that where he was? Or was this the next
one over? He couldn’t quite recall how
Main Street was laid out. He didn’t
frequent the shops here that often. Many
of them he’d never set foot in. He
didn’t have reason to. He didn’t own a
pet, for instance.
From this perspective, the building appeared to be deserted, except for
the footprints in the dust. Those were fresh. Someone had been using these steps very
recently. And frequently. A great many footprints had merged into a
path up the middle.
At the top was another door, this one unbroken and properly latched. He paused here and listened. Everything was quiet. He reached for the knob, but stopped
himself. He had no idea what was on the
other side of this door. Most of these
old Main Street shops had apartments over them.
What if this was someone’s home?
He couldn’t simply start rattling the knob, trying to break in. Best case scenario, someone would call the
police. Worst case scenario, he’d find
himself answering to a big, angry property owner with a big, angry gun aimed at
his face.
Again.
No, the stealthy approach was simply a bad idea. This was Aiden, not Hannibal Lecter. He closed his open hand, took a calming
breath and rapped his knuckles firmly against the door.
No one answered. He wasn’t
surprised. Aiden hadn’t looked overly
happy to see him, after all.
He knocked again. “Aiden?”
Not a sound.
“Is that you, Aiden? It’s Eric
Fortrell. Do you remember me?”
Still nothing.
Eric tried the knob. The door was
unlocked. It creaked open, an eerie
sound in the silence. “Hello? Anybody home?”
A narrow hallway stood before him.
Shadowy, dusty, with cobwebs in every corner. A kitchen was to his right, a cramped
bathroom to his left. He could see a
table in the dining room ahead of him. An
apartment, just as he’d predicted. But
it looked as decrepit and poorly kept as the stairs that brought him here. The paint was faded, peeling. There was water damage on the ceiling tiles
over the sink. There was no furniture
except an old gas stove and dated refrigerator.
It was hot and stuffy. And it
smelled bad, like overflowing trash cans and dirty public restrooms.
Aiden was nowhere to be seen.
Eric felt his stomach sink a little as he recalled a similar deserted
home, a farm house with the same kind of empty rooms. Like this time, he’d even followed someone
right through the door, someone who vanished before he could catch up.
He could even remember a similar, narrow hallway. A bathroom.
A bedroom. An old wardrobe…
Eric shuddered at the memory.
He forced himself to relax. This
was different. That place was far away,
unfamiliar, threatening. This was Creek
Bend, Wisconsin. His hometown.
And this place was far from deserted.
Someone had been here. It was a
mess.
“Hello?” he called again. “Aiden? Is that you?”
Still cradling the daisies in his arms, Eric stepped into the apartment
and looked around. Garbage was strewn
across the kitchen counter tops and now that he was inside, he could hear the
buzzing of flies. Standing there with
the daisies in his arms, he felt a strong urge to turn and flee back down the
steps.
“Please, God,” he muttered under his breath, “don’t let there be any dead
bodies in here…”
On the counter, next to the sink, surrounded by crumpled soda cans, warm
bottles of Aquafina water, snack food wrappers and empty tequila bottles sat
the paper bag Aiden had been carrying when he entered the alley. Eric walked over and peered inside. It was filled with junk food. Snack cakes, mini-donuts, pretzels, some
cereal bars… He was reminded of long
nights cramming for exams in college.
The only things missing were the Hot Pockets and microwave burritos.
Clearly, this was where Aiden went after he vanished from the alley. But where was he now?
Eric left the kitchen without searching it. It was obvious that no one was here. And he had no desire to check the fridge for
human heads. He returned to the hallway
instead.
The bathroom reeked. It smelled as
if no one had ever flushed the toilet. Covering
his mouth and nose against the stench, he leaned through the door and looked
around. There was no shower curtain and
a sizeable pile of dirty clothes lay in the bottom of the bathtub. A large package of toilet paper stood open
and half-empty on the floor within reach of the toilet. Beside this was an empty five-gallon
bucket. A toothbrush, a tube of
toothpaste, deodorant and a comb lay scattered on the counter around the sink
basin along with several empty bottles of water and one half-empty bottle of
Captain Morgan.
He reached out and twisted the knob on the sink, but no water came
out. Clearly, the bottles of water were
for brushing teeth while the bucket served to manually flush the toilet. But only occasionally, by the smell of
it.
The rum, Eric could only speculate, was the all-in-one medicine cabinet,
good for whatever ailed.
In need of fresher air, Eric withdrew from the smelly bathroom and moved
on.
Next door was a small bedroom. A
pile of old blankets were arranged into a makeshift bed surrounded by
flashlights, empty soda cans, more water bottles and even more empty liquor
bottles. There were junk food wrappers,
fast food bags, napkins and other trash, as well as more dirty laundry.
His eyes washed over these clothes, examining them. Pants and shirts, socks, briefs… No women’s clothing.
Eric eyed the bed nervously. A
tightly rolled blanket lay in the corner, a makeshift pillow. Aiden wasn’t merely spending time here…he
seemed to be living here. And had been
for a while. It must have taken at least
a few weeks to make this much of a mess, perhaps months.
But how could he have been here this long without attracting
attention? The whole county knew about Aiden Chadwick. His disappearance was the stuff of urban
legends.
Now he was beginning to look a little
more Hannibal Lecter-y.
Turning his back to the bedroom, Eric glanced back the way he’d come,
half-convinced that someone was sneaking up behind him. But the apartment remained empty and
silent.
He had a bad feeling about this place.
More and more, he was sure that what he found here was going to ruin his
day.
He walked to the end of the hallway and stepped into the combination
living and dining room. Here, the walls
were decorated with maps and photos of Creek Bend and the surrounding areas. In the middle of the room stood the cheap
folding table that Eric had seen from the doorway. A large map of the city was taped to it. Several locations were circled in black
Sharpie marker, each with a straight line drawn from it to the edge of the map,
seemingly at random. In the center of
one of the circles, a screw had been driven into the table. Two lengths of bright green string ran from
this screw to two more screws driven into the walls on two sides of the room, where
a strange, spiraling arrangement of numbers had been drawn onto the faded wallpaper. Strewn across the table on top of the map
were a wooden ruler, a compass, several markers and an old Polaroid camera.
There were more maps lying in an untidy pile on the floor under the
table.
What the hell was this?
That bad feeling grew even stronger.
Carefully, he placed the daisies on top of the map between the camera
and the compass and reached for his cell phone.
“Are you seeing this?” he asked as he pulled it from his pocket.
The phone rang obediently in his hand.
He answered it and lifted it to his ear without glancing at the
screen.
“I am.”
“It’s weird, right? I mean it’s
not just me?”
“Definitely not just you.”
“Like I should be concerned
about how weird this is.”
“I agree. You should be careful.”
Eric looked around the room again.
“You think I’m in danger?” The
only other door leading in and out of this apartment was in this room. With the apartment empty, Aiden must have
gone through there. By now he was
probably long gone.
“Never hurts to assume so.”
Eric nodded and said, “Especially when things are freakishly weird.”
“Especially then. I’m doing great, by the way. Thanks for asking.”
Eric was looking nervously around the room, appreciating just how weird
this all was, but as soon as she said this, he felt his shoulders slump. “Aw crap…
I’m sorry.”
Isabelle giggled. “I’m totally
just joking. It’s fine.”
“No it’s not.” Now that he was thinking
about it, it’d been over a week since he last spoke to her. Karen had been keeping him so busy preparing
for the shower… He felt like a
jerk.
“I’m fine, Eric. I’m not a
kid. Well… I am
a kid… You know what I mean. I can entertain myself.”
“Still, that was rude of me.”
“Seriously. Forget it. You should be focusing on those…what are those? Maps?”
Isabelle couldn’t actually see
what was in front of Eric. More
accurately, she could perceive what he was looking at by what he was feeling
and thinking. They shared a connection. It was…complicated.
Eric turned in a circle, scanning the walls around him. “Yeah.
The whole city. He’s circled a
bunch of locations for some reason.”
“He’s put some serious work into all this,” observed Isabelle. “But what’s he up to?”
Eric turned and leaned over the map on the table. This part of Main Street was enclosed in the
circle with the screw driven into it. A
line jutted out from the circle, pointing roughly westward. It crossed three other lines, each of which
originated from another circle elsewhere on the map, but did not appear to lead
anywhere. Each line ran to the end of
the map. And none of the drawn lines
matched the lines created by the two lengths of string. “Is he planning some kind of…massive
burglary?”
But Isabelle didn’t know.
There was another circle drawn over the hospital and another just south
of the water tower, centered over Milwaukee Street. The others didn’t seem to have any
outstanding landmarks to help locate them.
Only one of the circles did not have a black line running out from
it. Instead, it had been circled again
in bright red marker and then crossed out with an X. This particular location wasn’t far from his
home. He wondered why it was marked
out. It was the only one like it. Was it a mistake?
“I get a seriously weird feeling about that place,” warned Isabelle.
“Weird how?”
“I don’t know. I can’t quite put
my finger on it. But I really think you should be careful.”
Eric glanced around the room again.
There were two windows. One appeared
to have been broken. It was boarded over
with a roughly cut piece of plywood.
Eric’s eyes were drawn to a hole in the center of the wood. Bright sunlight was pouring through.
As he ducked under one of the strings and moved toward this window, he
saw that there were actually two boards, one behind the other, with about an
inch of empty space between them. The
second board had a hole in it, too, but it was offset from the first so that he
could only look through them at a sharp angle.
Peering through these holes, he could see the roof of one of the
buildings across the street and the tall peak of a distinct structure reaching
up behind it. Pressing his eye to the
hole for a better look, he thought at first that it was the steeple of the
Catholic church on Deer Street, but it was squared off, not pointed, less a
steeple than a tower. And as he thought about
it, he realized that Deer Street was in the opposite direction. This looked more like a clock tower, minus
the clock. But he couldn’t quite place the
building, even though he’d lived in Creek Bend most of his life.
A noise startled him. It sounded
like a door clicking closed.
Suddenly his heart was racing.
“Be careful!” hissed Isabelle.
Eric nodded but didn’t dare speak aloud.
Was that Aiden? He pressed his
back to the wall and glanced around the room.
The big, pink bouquet was still lying on the table, visible from the
door all the way down the hall. If
anyone had entered the apartment, they would know instantly that someone was
here.
That was really stupid.
But no one called out to ask who was trespassing. The building remained deathly quiet. The only sound was the occasional rumble of
passing traffic on the street outside and the thudding of Eric’s pulse in his
ears.
Silently, he stepped away from the wall and ducked under the string
again, careful not to make any noise. Seconds
passed as he crept toward the hallway, his body tense, ready to defend himself,
but no one came to investigate the bouquet.
The apartment remained quiet. And
when he peered around the corner, he found no one there.
He’d left the door open behind him.
Now it was closed. Perhaps a
breeze had pulled it shut. It wasn’t all
that unlikely. The door at the bottom of
the steps didn’t have a latch, so the wind could easily have created a
draft.
He checked the bedroom and bathroom, just to be sure, but both remained
empty. There was nowhere to hide. There weren’t even any closets.
He peered out the door and down the steps, but no one was there,
either.
Returning to the living/dining room, he opened the second door and looked
out. Another dark stairwell led down to
the first floor of the building.
Eric turned around and scanned the mysterious apartment again. If these were the only two exits, then Aiden could
only have gone this way.
Isabelle’s voice drifted up from his hand and he lifted the phone to his
ear. “What was that?”
“I said, what’s the deal with this guy, anyway? You knew him?”
“Not very well. Aiden was one of
my students about seven years ago. The
next year, he disappeared without a trace.
It was big news in this town for a long time.”
“A missing person, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“I can relate to that.”
Eric smiled. “That’s right.” He found Isabelle almost a year ago. She looked and sounded thirteen, but she’d
been missing for thirty-six years, trapped inside a living mansion that existed
between two worlds. She saved his life,
and in return he gave her the courage to escape her strange prison. But she still wasn’t exactly free. Although she’d left the terrifying Altrusk
House behind, she could only travel between buildings with similar
properties. She still couldn’t venture
outside.
“Maybe you can save Aiden, too, just like you did me.”
“Maybe.” But Aiden didn’t seem to
want to be found. He was gone as quickly
and mysteriously as he’d appeared. “But
for now, I’m going to hang up until I’m out of here.”
“I’ll be watching.”
“Thanks.”
Stuffing the phone back into his front pants pocket, he retrieved the
daisies from the table and then left the apartment down the spiral
staircase. At the bottom was a heavy,
steel door. Like the others, it was
unlocked.
He stepped through the door and immediately found himself standing in a
shadowy room that smelled of leather, stale beer and faint cigarette
smoke. A round, oak table stood before
him with a single, unlit candle resting in the middle. Four high-back chairs of matching oak stood
around it. Similar tables were set all
over the room. The walls were painted
black, the floors were hardwood. The
décor appeared to be a passionate marriage of Harley Davidson and United States
naval history. Leather jackets, gloves and
biker helmets mingled with American flags, framed photographs of aircraft
carriers and battleships, paintings of sailors, framed medals and other various
war memorabilia.
This was a bar.
He was still on Main Street, just a few doors down from the florist. He thought for a moment and finally realized
where he was. This was Big Brooke
Tavern.
Fantastic. He was now trespassing
in a biker bar before business hours.
This was definitely not somewhere
he wanted to be.
Quickly, he turned to retreat back up the steps, intending to instead leave
the way he came. But the heavy, metal
door to the spiral staircase was no longer there. He was staring at an empty wall adorned with
a painting of a bald eagle.
Baffled, he croaked a stifled, “What—?” and twirled around, scanning the
room.
Where the hell had the door gone?
He just came out of it. It was
right here.
Wasn’t it?
He pressed his hand against the wall and felt it. It made no sense. Doors didn’t just disappear. Yet this one had done just that. It was utterly gone.
He turned and looked out into the bar again. He had to get out of here.
Stepping around the table, he saw that there was a door to his right, but
it was clearly marked “FIRE EXIT” and warned him that an alarm would sound if
he attempted to open it.
That wasn’t desirable.
The only way out seemed to be the front door.
A loud bang came from the rear of the building, followed immediately by a
deep, angry voice that he couldn’t clearly hear but was certain had uttered a
profanity of some sort.
He wasn’t alone here.
Again, he wondered what would happen if he was caught. Would the owners call the police and have him
arrested? Or would they simply beat the
crap out of him and toss him out with the garbage?
Still clinging to the stupid daisies, Eric made for the front door,
weaving around tables as he went.
He glanced back. From here he
could see the polished bar with all its bottles of liquor neatly organized
behind it and its cozy stools sitting empty and waiting for the day’s first
patrons. He could also see the door to
the right of those bottles, leading back into the store room. There was a light on back there, shining
through the window in that door. If
someone glanced through that, he would be right out in the open and impossible
to miss.
He reached the front doors without drawing anyone’s attention, only to
find them locked tight. The handles
clanked noisily down, but refused to budge.
Panic exploded in his chest. No!
This wasn’t fair. What was he
supposed to do now?
“Hey!” boomed a frightful voice from the rear of the building.
Eric spun around. Standing behind
the bar, having just emerged from the store room, was a large man in a leather
vest with big, tattooed arms and an even bigger gut. His hair was cut so short it was little more
than a shadow covering his scalp, but he had more than enough beard to make up
for it. Black as coal, it cascaded down
his chest and came to rest on top of the huge bulge of his belly. “What are you doing in here? We’re closed.”
Frozen and wide-eyed, significantly outweighed and cradling the big, pink
bouquet of daisies in his arms, Eric never had a chance of intimidating this monstrous
man. Not even a little. He might as well burst into tears and wet
himself on top of it all. “I’m sorry,”
he stammered. “I think I’m lost.”
Eying the bouquet, the man said, “You think?”
From somewhere in the back room, he heard another voice, this one the deep,
throaty voice of a woman: “What are you
going on about?”
“I’m not talking to you,” the hairy barkeeper bellowed back.
“What?”
The man lifted his head, exasperated, and filled his mighty lungs. “Nothing!”
“I’m really sorry,” Eric said again.
“I don’t know what happened.” He
reached behind him and tried the door again, but it still wouldn’t open.
Stepping out from behind the bar and strolling toward him, looking even
bigger now that the bar wasn’t obscuring any of his impressive girth, the man
said, “I don’t either. Those doors’re
supposed to be locked.”
“Yeah…” Eric glanced back at the
doors and was struck by fleeting inspiration.
“They seem to be. Now. I was…”
He had to force himself to relax.
He hadn’t done anything wrong.
Well, he was trespassing…but he hadn’t done anything seriously wrong. “I wasn’t paying attention. I came into the wrong building. When I realized my mistake, I couldn’t get
back out.”
“Are you talking to somebody?” bellowed the woman from the back.
The barkeeper stopped and turned his back to Eric. “Just some guy at the door!” he shouted back
at her.
“We’re not open yet!”
The barkeeper threw his hands out to his sides as if to say, “No
kidding!” and shouted, “I know! He’s
just lost or something!” He turned back
to Eric, shaking his head and muttering something that sounded like, “Crazy
trucking woman…”
Eric was fairly sure the woman in back wasn’t a trucker.
“I really didn’t mean to cause any trouble.”
But the barkeeper waved a dismissive hand at him as he walked up and
shoved at the door. They were locked
tight. “That’s strange. Why would it let you in but not out?”
Eric feigned bewilderment and shrugged.
“No clue.”
The man looked at him, eying him up and down, and fished a huge set of
keys out of his pants pocket to unlock the door. At that moment, the store room door swung
open and a frightfully immense woman sauntered through. She was even taller than the man, at least
six and a half feet tall, with broad shoulders and broader hips, a huge mane of
badly dyed red hair and a vast amount of cleavage spilling out from a too-tight
corset top. She was wearing a lot more
makeup than was strictly necessary and gave off a far more impressive presence
than the bearded barkeeper. “Why’d you
let him in?” she asked, her voice booming over the silent bar. Eric thought she was probably used to the
atmosphere being much noisier in here.
“I didn’t let him in. He got in on
his own.”
“Didn’t you remember to lock the door?”
“Of course I remembered to lock the damn door. Don’t I always remember to lock the damn
door?”
“Then how’d he get in?”
“Hell if I know! Something funny
going on with the lock, I guess.”
“Well you’d better fix it. We
can’t have people just walking in whenever they want. We have business hours.”
“I know I’ve got to fix it. I
ain’t stupid, woman.”
“Again,” said Eric. “I’m sorry. I’m really embarrassed about this.”
The barkeeper shook his head and thumbed through his many keys.
The woman now eyed Eric with a distressingly keen interest. “Those for me, sweetie?”
“What?” Eric looked down at the
daisies, startled. He felt an instant
blush wash across his face. “Oh… No. I
mean… They’re for my wife. I mean, my wife sent me out for them. They’re for a baby shower. My sister-in-law, actually.”
A curious smile touched the woman’s lips.
For some reason, he felt like a slab of meat dangling in front of a
hungry tiger.
“I was supposed to go to the flower shop and the bakery, but I was
daydreaming and I guess I got turned around.”
“I’ll say you got turned around,” the woman told him. “The bakery’s right next to the florist. Two doors back the way you came.”
“Really? Two doors… I’m…
Wow. I’m sorry.”
“You would’ve had to walk past it to get here.”
Eric didn’t know what to say to this.
Now he was embarrassed about losing the door back up to the apartment and about being too stupid to find the
bakery.
The woman laughed. It was a hearty
laugh, loud in the silence of the closed bar.
“Well shit, it ain’t no wonder,” said the barkeeper. “Look at the size of that bouquet. Poor guy probably couldn’t see where he was
going.”
“Real men buy pretty flowers for their women.”
“I buy you flowers,” the man returned quickly, managing to sound hurt.
“Not pretty ones like those.”
“I buy you roses.”
“Red roses. I know. Every time.”
“I thought you liked red roses.
They symbolize love. Passion.”
“I do like red roses, but I like other flowers, too. Like those kind right there.”
The man looked at Eric, bemused.
“I should really let you two get back to work,” said Eric. “I didn’t mean to intrude.”
But Brooke went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “You just like buying red roses because you think
that’s the only kind you can buy that makes you look romantic instead of like a
pansy.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the man, but there was a
wounded look in his eyes that told Eric she knew exactly what she was talking
about. “Anyway, here you go.” He unlocked the door and swung it open,
puzzling over it. “Maybe I didn’t lock
it all the way or something.”
“That could be it,” Eric agreed.
“Maybe it didn’t quite catch or something.”
He nodded. “You might be
right. I’ll keep an eye on it. Maybe it’s just one of those one-time sort of
things. If it happens again, I’ll have
the locks replaced.”
Eric apologized again.
“Not your fault, buddy. Honest
mistake.”
These people were nice. Eric
almost regretted lying to them. But he
had no intention of telling them the truth, that he’d followed one of Creek
Bend’s most famous missing persons into their filthy upstairs apartment and
then walked into their closed tavern through a secret passage that vanished
while he had his back turned.
“Come back and have a beer sometime during business hours, why don’t
you?” said the woman.
“Oh, I might. It’s a real nice
place you’ve got here.”
“Thanks,” said the man. “We’re
real proud of it. I’m Leon, by the
way. Leon Rufar. That’s my wife, Brooke.”
“Brooke,” said Eric. “Right. This is…”
“Big Brooke Tavern,” said Brooke proudly.
“I’m Big Brooke.”
Eric had thought Big Brooke was a place, not a person, but it was just as
apt. Brooke was quite…big…after all… “I’m Eric Fortrell.”
Big Brooke gave him a curious smile and said, “Bring me a pretty flower, Eric,
and maybe I’ll give you something on the house.” This offer came with a mischievous wink that
left Eric baffled and more than a little uneasy.
Leon rolled his eyes. “Jesus,
woman…”
Eric bowed out the open door with an awkward smile. "Thanks," was all he could think to
say. Then he was walking down the
sidewalk, squinting in the bright sunlight again, the daisies rustling in the
breeze.
His phone chimed at him, alerting him to a new text message.
It was from Isabelle. As always,
her messages went straight to the screen, never giving him the option to view
or ignore it. This one read, I LIKE YOUR
NEW GIRLFRIEND
Eric shoved it back into his pocket.
“Ha ha.”
Don't miss the first book, Rushed, available for free wherever you like to buy your ebooks!
Rushed: The Unseen should be available in December. For a preview of the fun to come, just keep reading. What follows is the entire first chapter.
CHAPTER ONE
Two dozen pink Gerbera daisies.
Hailey’s favorite.
The girl at the flower shop smiled too much. Eric found it distracting.
It wasn’t an unkind smile. It
wasn’t even that there was nothing to smile about. It wasn’t a solemn occasion. The flowers weren’t for a funeral. Precisely the opposite, as a matter of
fact. They were for a baby shower. A celebration of happy expectations. The joyfully imminent arrival of a beautiful,
baby girl. There was no reason not to smile, really…but it felt a
little bit like she was laughing at him.
As she swiped his card, he eyed the bouquet. It was bigger than he’d expected. And so brightly colored… He might as well walk out of the store with
an armload of lit sparklers.
It was a silly thing, really.
Stupid, even. Just some childish
streak of macho pride nagging at him, asking him if he really intended to be
seen in broad daylight cradling this big, pink bouquet of daisies.
It didn’t help that the girl was so young. She looked about the same age as his high
school students, barely old enough to drive a car. And it never failed to impress him how cruel
kids could be at that age, how easy it was for them to ridicule others. And they could be especially mean-spirited
toward adults. At that age, looking out
at the world, you knew everything.
Looking back from that world, from
the other side of Eric’s thirty-two years, it was obvious that you really didn’t
know anything. Those differing
perceptions, from two completely opposing perspectives, sometimes made it
difficult to communicate. It created a
gap between them, a fissure of sorts.
Eric knew a thing or two about fissures.
His phone came to life in his pocket, buzzing urgently against his
thigh. That would be Karen. Again.
Begrudgingly, he fished the annoying device from the depths of his front
jeans pocket and answered it: “Hello?”
“Did you get the flowers?”
“Paying for them now.”
“How do they look?”
“Very pink.”
The girl’s smile broadened. It
looked warmer now, friendlier, less mocking.
Perhaps it really had all been in his imagination.
“Hailey’ll love them. Don’t you
think?”
“Definitely. Nothing celebrates a
new life like decapitating some pretty plants.”
The girl giggled a little at this as she handed him back his debit card.
“Out with the old, in with the new,” declared Karen.
“One way of putting it, I guess.”
Eric punched in his PIN number and asked, “How are the cupcakes coming?”
“First batch is done.”
“Awesome. You girls having
fun?”
“Yes, we are.”
“That’s good.”
Eric returned his card to his wallet and lifted the bouquet off the
counter. How was he supposed to even
hold this stupid thing? They looked so
delicate, yet they were heavy enough to demand a firm grip. And while he was talking on the phone, he
couldn’t even handle them with both hands.
He’d never really developed that knack for holding the phone in the
crook of his neck like other people. He
always dropped the damned thing.
Maybe he had an abnormal neck.
He hated cell phones. He hated the
way people were always talking on them, as if everything they had to say was
far too important to wait until they returned home. Talking and talking and talking, in their
cars, at restaurants, while checking out in stores…like he was doing now… But Karen insisted he carry one. She was a firm believer that everyone should
have one on them at all times. In case
of emergency. Or, you know, in case she
just wanted to talk to her husband right
now.
Personally, he’d rather just ignore the stupid thing. But if there was one thing he’d learned as
Karen’s loving and devoted husband, it was that she hated for her calls to be ignored.
“Diane keeps asking me to have you bring home tequila, though.”
“That doesn’t seem like a good idea.
Won’t the cupcakes get more lopsided as you go?”
“That’s what I keep telling her.”
From the background, Eric heard Diane say, “Everything’s more fun with
margaritas.”
Eric smiled at this. “She does
have a point.”
“Don’t encourage her.”
Karen met Diane Shucker at college, where they were roommates. They’d been best friends ever since. Today, Diane was helping prepare for the
shower. Although Eric had noticed on
previous occasions like this one that “helping” usually meant little more than
keeping her company. Karen always did
the vast majority of the work. Diane
would hand her things and help keep the kitchen tidy, but she would mostly just
sit with her, the two of them gossiping and giggling like schoolgirls.
Karen earned a fair amount of spending money as a freelance cake
decorator and caterer. Her cakes, pies
and cookies had won awards at every county fair for the past six years. As a result, she spent most Fridays and
Saturdays in the kitchen, preparing for one gathering or another.
Eric thought she should just open a business and hire some real help, but
she didn’t care at all for the idea of turning her hobby into a career. She was convinced it would take all the fun
out of it, and he supposed she might be right about that.
Satisfied that the bouquet wasn’t going to topple out of his grip, Eric
nodded goodbye to the overly-smiley, too-young florist and quickly made for the
door.
“I just got off the phone with Hailey, actually,” Karen informed
him.
“Oh yeah? How is she today?”
“Good. Her family got here last
night.” Hailey was his and Karen’s
sister-in-law. Her husband, Andrew, was
Karen’s baby brother. This would be
their first child, and the first grandchild for Hailey’s parents. It was a big event for the entire
family. They drove all the way down from
Northern Minnesota for this shower.
“That’s good.”
“It is. But they all showed up.”
“Uh oh.” Eric stepped out into the
warm sunshine and squinted at the surrounding street. He didn’t see anyone staring at him with one
of those stupid smiles, but there was plenty of ground to cover between him and
his silver PT Cruiser.
“Uh huh.” They’d only been expecting
Hailey’s parents and maybe an aunt or two.
“So I’m going to need you to bring home some more sparkling juice.”
“Sounds like a wild time. Red or
white?”
“Both. About four more bottles, I
think.”
“Each?”
“No. Four total. Two of each should do it.”
“That going to be enough?”
“I think so. Sounds like her dad
and uncles brought down enough beer to show the whole town a good time.”
“Now you’re talking.”
“Right.” He knew she was rolling
her eyes. It was a baby shower, not a
wedding reception. She hadn’t planned on
having any alcohol. She stood firmly by
her assertion that it simply wouldn’t be fair to the expectant mother. And he certainly couldn’t argue with
that. He wouldn’t want to be thrown a
party where he was the only one not allowed to drink.
Eric made it to the PT Cruiser without attracting a crowd and stopped as
he realized that he now had no idea how he was going to dig the keys out of his
pocket to unlock it.
So close to sanctuary…
“Anything else?”
Karen took a moment to think it over.
Eric wondered if she was doing it on purpose. “I don’t think so,” she decided at last.
“Okay. I’ll see you in a little
bit, then.”
“’Kay. Bye.”
Eric said goodbye and hung up. He
shoved the phone back into his left, front pocket and then awkwardly shifted
the bouquet to his left hand so he could retrieve the keys from his right, front pocket. A light breeze blew past him, threatening to
unbalance the daisies, and he had to rest them gently against the side of the
vehicle to keep from dropping them.
Once the keys were in his hand, he unlocked the PT Cruiser and glanced
around one last time. Still, nobody
seemed to be staring at him. Nobody he
could see, at least. That silly part of
his brain was convinced that there were dozens of laughing eyes hidden behind
all those store windows. But the only
person he saw was a man in a navy blue hoodie hurrying across the street with a
paper grocery sack in his arms.
Something about this man seemed curious.
Perhaps it was the hoodie. It
wasn’t sweltering out, but it was
early June and plenty warm enough for shorts and tee shirts.
Eric watched this man as he hurried into a narrow alley between two
buildings. There, just beyond the
sidewalk, he turned to look back the way he came, pulling down his hood as he
did, allowing an unobstructed view of his face.
Immediately, the big, pink bouquet was forgotten. Here, right before his eyes, was a face he
hadn’t seen in over six years. In fact,
as far as he knew, no one had seen
this face in over six years.
Aiden…?
The young man turned and scanned the street and sidewalk until his eyes
met Eric’s. Instantly, surprise washed
over him. Then panic. He turned and bolted deeper into the alley
and out of sight.
Eric hurried after him, but by the time he entered the alley, Aiden (if
it really was Aiden) was gone.
A high, chain link fence blocked the back of the alley. It was old and flimsy and didn’t look like it
would stop anyone sufficiently determined to pass through it, but it should
have been enough to slow someone down.
And Aiden hadn’t been out of sight for more than a few seconds.
On the left side of the alley, between him and the fence, a door stood
ajar. It was much more likely that he’d
gone in there.
Cradling the flowers in his arms, Eric walked to this door and opened it
wide. It didn’t close. There was no latch and no lock. It swung freely on its creaky hinges,
practically useless. Inside was darkness
and silence. A shadowy set of stairs led
up to a second floor landing.
He hesitated. He didn’t like
this. He felt like a child standing at
the front gate of a haunted house. And
he had every reason to be apprehensive.
He’d done this sort of thing before.
And unlike when he was a child, he knew first-hand that monsters were
real.
He glanced around once more, but this seemed to be the only place the
mysterious young man could have gone.
He didn’t have to do this. He
could walk away. He could just go
home. But… What if it really was Aiden?
Was it possible? After all this
time?
If it was him, he couldn’t just
leave. It would haunt him for the rest
of his life. Aiden Chadwick was one of this
city’s greatest unsolved mysteries.
He looked back up into the shadows at the top of the steps and took a
deep breath. “Don’t worry,” he said to
himself. “You brought flowers. What could go wrong?”
But that was a poor choice of words.
He’d always possessed a very vivid imagination and it was quick to bring
to mind several ghoulish examples of how things could go very, very wrong.
Mentally bracing himself, he stepped through the doorway and began to
climb the stairs. It was dusty in
here. The paint was peeling from the
walls. The handrail was coming
loose.
What building was this? The bakery
was next to the florist. Then that
little pet grooming shop, Sheltie’s. Was
that where he was? Or was this the next
one over? He couldn’t quite recall how
Main Street was laid out. He didn’t
frequent the shops here that often. Many
of them he’d never set foot in. He
didn’t have reason to. He didn’t own a
pet, for instance.
From this perspective, the building appeared to be deserted, except for
the footprints in the dust. Those were fresh. Someone had been using these steps very
recently. And frequently. A great many footprints had merged into a
path up the middle.
At the top was another door, this one unbroken and properly latched. He paused here and listened. Everything was quiet. He reached for the knob, but stopped
himself. He had no idea what was on the
other side of this door. Most of these
old Main Street shops had apartments over them.
What if this was someone’s home?
He couldn’t simply start rattling the knob, trying to break in. Best case scenario, someone would call the
police. Worst case scenario, he’d find
himself answering to a big, angry property owner with a big, angry gun aimed at
his face.
Again.
No, the stealthy approach was simply a bad idea. This was Aiden, not Hannibal Lecter. He closed his open hand, took a calming
breath and rapped his knuckles firmly against the door.
No one answered. He wasn’t
surprised. Aiden hadn’t looked overly
happy to see him, after all.
He knocked again. “Aiden?”
Not a sound.
“Is that you, Aiden? It’s Eric
Fortrell. Do you remember me?”
Still nothing.
Eric tried the knob. The door was
unlocked. It creaked open, an eerie
sound in the silence. “Hello? Anybody home?”
A narrow hallway stood before him.
Shadowy, dusty, with cobwebs in every corner. A kitchen was to his right, a cramped
bathroom to his left. He could see a
table in the dining room ahead of him. An
apartment, just as he’d predicted. But
it looked as decrepit and poorly kept as the stairs that brought him here. The paint was faded, peeling. There was water damage on the ceiling tiles
over the sink. There was no furniture
except an old gas stove and dated refrigerator.
It was hot and stuffy. And it
smelled bad, like overflowing trash cans and dirty public restrooms.
Aiden was nowhere to be seen.
Eric felt his stomach sink a little as he recalled a similar deserted
home, a farm house with the same kind of empty rooms. Like this time, he’d even followed someone
right through the door, someone who vanished before he could catch up.
He could even remember a similar, narrow hallway. A bathroom.
A bedroom. An old wardrobe…
Eric shuddered at the memory.
He forced himself to relax. This
was different. That place was far away,
unfamiliar, threatening. This was Creek
Bend, Wisconsin. His hometown.
And this place was far from deserted.
Someone had been here. It was a
mess.
“Hello?” he called again. “Aiden? Is that you?”
Still cradling the daisies in his arms, Eric stepped into the apartment
and looked around. Garbage was strewn
across the kitchen counter tops and now that he was inside, he could hear the
buzzing of flies. Standing there with
the daisies in his arms, he felt a strong urge to turn and flee back down the
steps.
“Please, God,” he muttered under his breath, “don’t let there be any dead
bodies in here…”
On the counter, next to the sink, surrounded by crumpled soda cans, warm
bottles of Aquafina water, snack food wrappers and empty tequila bottles sat
the paper bag Aiden had been carrying when he entered the alley. Eric walked over and peered inside. It was filled with junk food. Snack cakes, mini-donuts, pretzels, some
cereal bars… He was reminded of long
nights cramming for exams in college.
The only things missing were the Hot Pockets and microwave burritos.
Clearly, this was where Aiden went after he vanished from the alley. But where was he now?
Eric left the kitchen without searching it. It was obvious that no one was here. And he had no desire to check the fridge for
human heads. He returned to the hallway
instead.
The bathroom reeked. It smelled as
if no one had ever flushed the toilet. Covering
his mouth and nose against the stench, he leaned through the door and looked
around. There was no shower curtain and
a sizeable pile of dirty clothes lay in the bottom of the bathtub. A large package of toilet paper stood open
and half-empty on the floor within reach of the toilet. Beside this was an empty five-gallon
bucket. A toothbrush, a tube of
toothpaste, deodorant and a comb lay scattered on the counter around the sink
basin along with several empty bottles of water and one half-empty bottle of
Captain Morgan.
He reached out and twisted the knob on the sink, but no water came
out. Clearly, the bottles of water were
for brushing teeth while the bucket served to manually flush the toilet. But only occasionally, by the smell of
it.
The rum, Eric could only speculate, was the all-in-one medicine cabinet,
good for whatever ailed.
In need of fresher air, Eric withdrew from the smelly bathroom and moved
on.
Next door was a small bedroom. A
pile of old blankets were arranged into a makeshift bed surrounded by
flashlights, empty soda cans, more water bottles and even more empty liquor
bottles. There were junk food wrappers,
fast food bags, napkins and other trash, as well as more dirty laundry.
His eyes washed over these clothes, examining them. Pants and shirts, socks, briefs… No women’s clothing.
Eric eyed the bed nervously. A
tightly rolled blanket lay in the corner, a makeshift pillow. Aiden wasn’t merely spending time here…he
seemed to be living here. And had been
for a while. It must have taken at least
a few weeks to make this much of a mess, perhaps months.
But how could he have been here this long without attracting
attention? The whole county knew about Aiden Chadwick. His disappearance was the stuff of urban
legends.
Now he was beginning to look a little
more Hannibal Lecter-y.
Turning his back to the bedroom, Eric glanced back the way he’d come,
half-convinced that someone was sneaking up behind him. But the apartment remained empty and
silent.
He had a bad feeling about this place.
More and more, he was sure that what he found here was going to ruin his
day.
He walked to the end of the hallway and stepped into the combination
living and dining room. Here, the walls
were decorated with maps and photos of Creek Bend and the surrounding areas. In the middle of the room stood the cheap
folding table that Eric had seen from the doorway. A large map of the city was taped to it. Several locations were circled in black
Sharpie marker, each with a straight line drawn from it to the edge of the map,
seemingly at random. In the center of
one of the circles, a screw had been driven into the table. Two lengths of bright green string ran from
this screw to two more screws driven into the walls on two sides of the room, where
a strange, spiraling arrangement of numbers had been drawn onto the faded wallpaper. Strewn across the table on top of the map
were a wooden ruler, a compass, several markers and an old Polaroid camera.
There were more maps lying in an untidy pile on the floor under the
table.
What the hell was this?
That bad feeling grew even stronger.
Carefully, he placed the daisies on top of the map between the camera
and the compass and reached for his cell phone.
“Are you seeing this?” he asked as he pulled it from his pocket.
The phone rang obediently in his hand.
He answered it and lifted it to his ear without glancing at the
screen.
“I am.”
“It’s weird, right? I mean it’s
not just me?”
“Definitely not just you.”
“Like I should be concerned
about how weird this is.”
“I agree. You should be careful.”
Eric looked around the room again.
“You think I’m in danger?” The
only other door leading in and out of this apartment was in this room. With the apartment empty, Aiden must have
gone through there. By now he was
probably long gone.
“Never hurts to assume so.”
Eric nodded and said, “Especially when things are freakishly weird.”
“Especially then. I’m doing great, by the way. Thanks for asking.”
Eric was looking nervously around the room, appreciating just how weird
this all was, but as soon as she said this, he felt his shoulders slump. “Aw crap…
I’m sorry.”
Isabelle giggled. “I’m totally
just joking. It’s fine.”
“No it’s not.” Now that he was thinking
about it, it’d been over a week since he last spoke to her. Karen had been keeping him so busy preparing
for the shower… He felt like a
jerk.
“I’m fine, Eric. I’m not a
kid. Well… I am
a kid… You know what I mean. I can entertain myself.”
“Still, that was rude of me.”
“Seriously. Forget it. You should be focusing on those…what are those? Maps?”
Isabelle couldn’t actually see
what was in front of Eric. More
accurately, she could perceive what he was looking at by what he was feeling
and thinking. They shared a connection. It was…complicated.
Eric turned in a circle, scanning the walls around him. “Yeah.
The whole city. He’s circled a
bunch of locations for some reason.”
“He’s put some serious work into all this,” observed Isabelle. “But what’s he up to?”
Eric turned and leaned over the map on the table. This part of Main Street was enclosed in the
circle with the screw driven into it. A
line jutted out from the circle, pointing roughly westward. It crossed three other lines, each of which
originated from another circle elsewhere on the map, but did not appear to lead
anywhere. Each line ran to the end of
the map. And none of the drawn lines
matched the lines created by the two lengths of string. “Is he planning some kind of…massive
burglary?”
But Isabelle didn’t know.
There was another circle drawn over the hospital and another just south
of the water tower, centered over Milwaukee Street. The others didn’t seem to have any
outstanding landmarks to help locate them.
Only one of the circles did not have a black line running out from
it. Instead, it had been circled again
in bright red marker and then crossed out with an X. This particular location wasn’t far from his
home. He wondered why it was marked
out. It was the only one like it. Was it a mistake?
“I get a seriously weird feeling about that place,” warned Isabelle.
“Weird how?”
“I don’t know. I can’t quite put
my finger on it. But I really think you should be careful.”
Eric glanced around the room again.
There were two windows. One appeared
to have been broken. It was boarded over
with a roughly cut piece of plywood.
Eric’s eyes were drawn to a hole in the center of the wood. Bright sunlight was pouring through.
As he ducked under one of the strings and moved toward this window, he
saw that there were actually two boards, one behind the other, with about an
inch of empty space between them. The
second board had a hole in it, too, but it was offset from the first so that he
could only look through them at a sharp angle.
Peering through these holes, he could see the roof of one of the
buildings across the street and the tall peak of a distinct structure reaching
up behind it. Pressing his eye to the
hole for a better look, he thought at first that it was the steeple of the
Catholic church on Deer Street, but it was squared off, not pointed, less a
steeple than a tower. And as he thought about
it, he realized that Deer Street was in the opposite direction. This looked more like a clock tower, minus
the clock. But he couldn’t quite place the
building, even though he’d lived in Creek Bend most of his life.
A noise startled him. It sounded
like a door clicking closed.
Suddenly his heart was racing.
“Be careful!” hissed Isabelle.
Eric nodded but didn’t dare speak aloud.
Was that Aiden? He pressed his
back to the wall and glanced around the room.
The big, pink bouquet was still lying on the table, visible from the
door all the way down the hall. If
anyone had entered the apartment, they would know instantly that someone was
here.
That was really stupid.
But no one called out to ask who was trespassing. The building remained deathly quiet. The only sound was the occasional rumble of
passing traffic on the street outside and the thudding of Eric’s pulse in his
ears.
Silently, he stepped away from the wall and ducked under the string
again, careful not to make any noise. Seconds
passed as he crept toward the hallway, his body tense, ready to defend himself,
but no one came to investigate the bouquet.
The apartment remained quiet. And
when he peered around the corner, he found no one there.
He’d left the door open behind him.
Now it was closed. Perhaps a
breeze had pulled it shut. It wasn’t all
that unlikely. The door at the bottom of
the steps didn’t have a latch, so the wind could easily have created a
draft.
He checked the bedroom and bathroom, just to be sure, but both remained
empty. There was nowhere to hide. There weren’t even any closets.
He peered out the door and down the steps, but no one was there,
either.
Returning to the living/dining room, he opened the second door and looked
out. Another dark stairwell led down to
the first floor of the building.
Eric turned around and scanned the mysterious apartment again. If these were the only two exits, then Aiden could
only have gone this way.
Isabelle’s voice drifted up from his hand and he lifted the phone to his
ear. “What was that?”
“I said, what’s the deal with this guy, anyway? You knew him?”
“Not very well. Aiden was one of
my students about seven years ago. The
next year, he disappeared without a trace.
It was big news in this town for a long time.”
“A missing person, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“I can relate to that.”
Eric smiled. “That’s right.” He found Isabelle almost a year ago. She looked and sounded thirteen, but she’d
been missing for thirty-six years, trapped inside a living mansion that existed
between two worlds. She saved his life,
and in return he gave her the courage to escape her strange prison. But she still wasn’t exactly free. Although she’d left the terrifying Altrusk
House behind, she could only travel between buildings with similar
properties. She still couldn’t venture
outside.
“Maybe you can save Aiden, too, just like you did me.”
“Maybe.” But Aiden didn’t seem to
want to be found. He was gone as quickly
and mysteriously as he’d appeared. “But
for now, I’m going to hang up until I’m out of here.”
“I’ll be watching.”
“Thanks.”
Stuffing the phone back into his front pants pocket, he retrieved the
daisies from the table and then left the apartment down the spiral
staircase. At the bottom was a heavy,
steel door. Like the others, it was
unlocked.
He stepped through the door and immediately found himself standing in a
shadowy room that smelled of leather, stale beer and faint cigarette
smoke. A round, oak table stood before
him with a single, unlit candle resting in the middle. Four high-back chairs of matching oak stood
around it. Similar tables were set all
over the room. The walls were painted
black, the floors were hardwood. The
décor appeared to be a passionate marriage of Harley Davidson and United States
naval history. Leather jackets, gloves and
biker helmets mingled with American flags, framed photographs of aircraft
carriers and battleships, paintings of sailors, framed medals and other various
war memorabilia.
This was a bar.
He was still on Main Street, just a few doors down from the florist. He thought for a moment and finally realized
where he was. This was Big Brooke
Tavern.
Fantastic. He was now trespassing
in a biker bar before business hours.
This was definitely not somewhere
he wanted to be.
Quickly, he turned to retreat back up the steps, intending to instead leave
the way he came. But the heavy, metal
door to the spiral staircase was no longer there. He was staring at an empty wall adorned with
a painting of a bald eagle.
Baffled, he croaked a stifled, “What—?” and twirled around, scanning the
room.
Where the hell had the door gone?
He just came out of it. It was
right here.
Wasn’t it?
He pressed his hand against the wall and felt it. It made no sense. Doors didn’t just disappear. Yet this one had done just that. It was utterly gone.
He turned and looked out into the bar again. He had to get out of here.
Stepping around the table, he saw that there was a door to his right, but
it was clearly marked “FIRE EXIT” and warned him that an alarm would sound if
he attempted to open it.
That wasn’t desirable.
The only way out seemed to be the front door.
A loud bang came from the rear of the building, followed immediately by a
deep, angry voice that he couldn’t clearly hear but was certain had uttered a
profanity of some sort.
He wasn’t alone here.
Again, he wondered what would happen if he was caught. Would the owners call the police and have him
arrested? Or would they simply beat the
crap out of him and toss him out with the garbage?
Still clinging to the stupid daisies, Eric made for the front door,
weaving around tables as he went.
He glanced back. From here he
could see the polished bar with all its bottles of liquor neatly organized
behind it and its cozy stools sitting empty and waiting for the day’s first
patrons. He could also see the door to
the right of those bottles, leading back into the store room. There was a light on back there, shining
through the window in that door. If
someone glanced through that, he would be right out in the open and impossible
to miss.
He reached the front doors without drawing anyone’s attention, only to
find them locked tight. The handles
clanked noisily down, but refused to budge.
Panic exploded in his chest. No!
This wasn’t fair. What was he
supposed to do now?
“Hey!” boomed a frightful voice from the rear of the building.
Eric spun around. Standing behind
the bar, having just emerged from the store room, was a large man in a leather
vest with big, tattooed arms and an even bigger gut. His hair was cut so short it was little more
than a shadow covering his scalp, but he had more than enough beard to make up
for it. Black as coal, it cascaded down
his chest and came to rest on top of the huge bulge of his belly. “What are you doing in here? We’re closed.”
Frozen and wide-eyed, significantly outweighed and cradling the big, pink
bouquet of daisies in his arms, Eric never had a chance of intimidating this monstrous
man. Not even a little. He might as well burst into tears and wet
himself on top of it all. “I’m sorry,”
he stammered. “I think I’m lost.”
Eying the bouquet, the man said, “You think?”
From somewhere in the back room, he heard another voice, this one the deep,
throaty voice of a woman: “What are you
going on about?”
“I’m not talking to you,” the hairy barkeeper bellowed back.
“What?”
The man lifted his head, exasperated, and filled his mighty lungs. “Nothing!”
“I’m really sorry,” Eric said again.
“I don’t know what happened.” He
reached behind him and tried the door again, but it still wouldn’t open.
Stepping out from behind the bar and strolling toward him, looking even
bigger now that the bar wasn’t obscuring any of his impressive girth, the man
said, “I don’t either. Those doors’re
supposed to be locked.”
“Yeah…” Eric glanced back at the
doors and was struck by fleeting inspiration.
“They seem to be. Now. I was…”
He had to force himself to relax.
He hadn’t done anything wrong.
Well, he was trespassing…but he hadn’t done anything seriously wrong. “I wasn’t paying attention. I came into the wrong building. When I realized my mistake, I couldn’t get
back out.”
“Are you talking to somebody?” bellowed the woman from the back.
The barkeeper stopped and turned his back to Eric. “Just some guy at the door!” he shouted back
at her.
“We’re not open yet!”
The barkeeper threw his hands out to his sides as if to say, “No
kidding!” and shouted, “I know! He’s
just lost or something!” He turned back
to Eric, shaking his head and muttering something that sounded like, “Crazy
trucking woman…”
Eric was fairly sure the woman in back wasn’t a trucker.
“I really didn’t mean to cause any trouble.”
But the barkeeper waved a dismissive hand at him as he walked up and
shoved at the door. They were locked
tight. “That’s strange. Why would it let you in but not out?”
Eric feigned bewilderment and shrugged.
“No clue.”
The man looked at him, eying him up and down, and fished a huge set of
keys out of his pants pocket to unlock the door. At that moment, the store room door swung
open and a frightfully immense woman sauntered through. She was even taller than the man, at least
six and a half feet tall, with broad shoulders and broader hips, a huge mane of
badly dyed red hair and a vast amount of cleavage spilling out from a too-tight
corset top. She was wearing a lot more
makeup than was strictly necessary and gave off a far more impressive presence
than the bearded barkeeper. “Why’d you
let him in?” she asked, her voice booming over the silent bar. Eric thought she was probably used to the
atmosphere being much noisier in here.
“I didn’t let him in. He got in on
his own.”
“Didn’t you remember to lock the door?”
“Of course I remembered to lock the damn door. Don’t I always remember to lock the damn
door?”
“Then how’d he get in?”
“Hell if I know! Something funny
going on with the lock, I guess.”
“Well you’d better fix it. We
can’t have people just walking in whenever they want. We have business hours.”
“I know I’ve got to fix it. I
ain’t stupid, woman.”
“Again,” said Eric. “I’m sorry. I’m really embarrassed about this.”
The barkeeper shook his head and thumbed through his many keys.
The woman now eyed Eric with a distressingly keen interest. “Those for me, sweetie?”
“What?” Eric looked down at the
daisies, startled. He felt an instant
blush wash across his face. “Oh… No. I
mean… They’re for my wife. I mean, my wife sent me out for them. They’re for a baby shower. My sister-in-law, actually.”
A curious smile touched the woman’s lips.
For some reason, he felt like a slab of meat dangling in front of a
hungry tiger.
“I was supposed to go to the flower shop and the bakery, but I was
daydreaming and I guess I got turned around.”
“I’ll say you got turned around,” the woman told him. “The bakery’s right next to the florist. Two doors back the way you came.”
“Really? Two doors… I’m…
Wow. I’m sorry.”
“You would’ve had to walk past it to get here.”
Eric didn’t know what to say to this.
Now he was embarrassed about losing the door back up to the apartment and about being too stupid to find the
bakery.
The woman laughed. It was a hearty
laugh, loud in the silence of the closed bar.
“Well shit, it ain’t no wonder,” said the barkeeper. “Look at the size of that bouquet. Poor guy probably couldn’t see where he was
going.”
“Real men buy pretty flowers for their women.”
“I buy you flowers,” the man returned quickly, managing to sound hurt.
“Not pretty ones like those.”
“I buy you roses.”
“Red roses. I know. Every time.”
“I thought you liked red roses.
They symbolize love. Passion.”
“I do like red roses, but I like other flowers, too. Like those kind right there.”
The man looked at Eric, bemused.
“I should really let you two get back to work,” said Eric. “I didn’t mean to intrude.”
But Brooke went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “You just like buying red roses because you think
that’s the only kind you can buy that makes you look romantic instead of like a
pansy.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the man, but there was a
wounded look in his eyes that told Eric she knew exactly what she was talking
about. “Anyway, here you go.” He unlocked the door and swung it open,
puzzling over it. “Maybe I didn’t lock
it all the way or something.”
“That could be it,” Eric agreed.
“Maybe it didn’t quite catch or something.”
He nodded. “You might be
right. I’ll keep an eye on it. Maybe it’s just one of those one-time sort of
things. If it happens again, I’ll have
the locks replaced.”
Eric apologized again.
“Not your fault, buddy. Honest
mistake.”
These people were nice. Eric
almost regretted lying to them. But he
had no intention of telling them the truth, that he’d followed one of Creek
Bend’s most famous missing persons into their filthy upstairs apartment and
then walked into their closed tavern through a secret passage that vanished
while he had his back turned.
“Come back and have a beer sometime during business hours, why don’t
you?” said the woman.
“Oh, I might. It’s a real nice
place you’ve got here.”
“Thanks,” said the man. “We’re
real proud of it. I’m Leon, by the
way. Leon Rufar. That’s my wife, Brooke.”
“Brooke,” said Eric. “Right. This is…”
“Big Brooke Tavern,” said Brooke proudly.
“I’m Big Brooke.”
Eric had thought Big Brooke was a place, not a person, but it was just as
apt. Brooke was quite…big…after all… “I’m Eric Fortrell.”
Big Brooke gave him a curious smile and said, “Bring me a pretty flower, Eric,
and maybe I’ll give you something on the house.” This offer came with a mischievous wink that
left Eric baffled and more than a little uneasy.
Leon rolled his eyes. “Jesus,
woman…”
Eric bowed out the open door with an awkward smile. "Thanks," was all he could think to
say. Then he was walking down the
sidewalk, squinting in the bright sunlight again, the daisies rustling in the
breeze.
His phone chimed at him, alerting him to a new text message.
It was from Isabelle. As always,
her messages went straight to the screen, never giving him the option to view
or ignore it. This one read, I LIKE YOUR
NEW GIRLFRIEND
Eric shoved it back into his pocket.
“Ha ha.”
Don't miss the first book, Rushed, available for free wherever you like to buy your ebooks!
May 28, 2013
The Judgment of the Sentinels
The sixth and final book of The Temple of the Blind is now on sale! You may commence happy dancing. I'll wait. Just read on when you're ready...
In The Judgment of the Sentinels, Albert Cross emerges from the terrifying labyrinths of the Temple of the Blind with a broken arm and a burdened heart, only to discover that he and his friends must now climb to the summit of a mountain engulfed in fire. Lost in a world of perpetual darkness, surrounded by countless miles of deadly forest, they have no choice but to journey onward or perish in this strange land where little separates the living from the dead. Exhausted, hungry and weak, they will need to rely on every skill they have to survive this final task, including those skills they don’t yet know they possess.
Purchase this book now at these online retailers:
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Judgment-Sentinels-Temple-Blind-ebook/dp/B00D1BXS4K
Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/320412
B&N: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-judgment-of-the-sentinels-brian-harmon/1115427382
And if you haven't read any of The Temple of the Blind yet, now's a great time to start. Book one in the series, The Box, is free to read on all ereading devices.
Happy reading!
In The Judgment of the Sentinels, Albert Cross emerges from the terrifying labyrinths of the Temple of the Blind with a broken arm and a burdened heart, only to discover that he and his friends must now climb to the summit of a mountain engulfed in fire. Lost in a world of perpetual darkness, surrounded by countless miles of deadly forest, they have no choice but to journey onward or perish in this strange land where little separates the living from the dead. Exhausted, hungry and weak, they will need to rely on every skill they have to survive this final task, including those skills they don’t yet know they possess.
Purchase this book now at these online retailers:
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Judgment-Sentinels-Temple-Blind-ebook/dp/B00D1BXS4K
Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/320412
B&N: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-judgment-of-the-sentinels-brian-harmon/1115427382
And if you haven't read any of The Temple of the Blind yet, now's a great time to start. Book one in the series, The Box, is free to read on all ereading devices.
Happy reading!
May 26, 2013
Big Giveaway!
With the impending release of The Judgment of the Sentinels, I found myself looking for a good
way to celebrate the completion of The
Temple of the Blind. It is, after
all, a celebration-worthy achievement, I think.
It’s been more than twelve years since I first put pen to paper and
scratched out the first rough chapter of The
Box. This sixth book represents the
culmination of all that time and work. I
want to do something special. And I want
to do something that will include all my fans.
After a little thought, I decided that I could think of no better way to
celebrate than to finally hold my first giveaway. In fact, I’ll be holding more than one.
If you’ve been following me on Facebook or checking the newsfeed
over on my website, you already know that I’ll be giving away a free signed
copy of the new paperback over at Goodreads.com. (If you’re not following me on Facebook,
now’s a good time to sneak over there and like my page, https://www.facebook.com/BrianHarmonBooks,
before anyone notices.) Signup is open
until July 16. You can find all the
details at http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/53439-the-judgment-of-the-sentinels.
I’m also holding a second giveaway right here on Dark Things Rising. Starting today, you can enter to win the
ENTIRE SIX-BOOK SET of The Temple of the
Blind book series, signed by yours truly.
These six paperbacks are 5.25x8 inch format, retailing at a combined
price of $90.94 plus shipping, entirely FREE for one lucky fan. How does that sound?
So what do you have to do to be eligible to win this awesome
prize? I puzzled over this part for a
while. After all, this is a great
opportunity to encourage fans to help me build my online presence. I could ask you to join the blog (that little
“join this site” button over on the right-hand column). You could like my Facebook page (same link as
the one above). You could follow me on
Twitter (@HarmonUniverse). You could
share the link to my website with all your friends or write reviews for my
books at your favorite online bookstore.
But that all seems like a lot of trouble, so I’ll just ask you to head
over to my website contact form (http://www.HarmonUniverse.com/contactme)
and join my mailing list. I’ll need your
name and email address anyway to contact you if you win. And you don’t have to worry about me spamming
you or selling your address or signing you up for erectile dysfunction
newsletters or…you know…anything like that.
I only use my mailing list to inform my fans of new and upcoming
releases and maybe future giveaways, too.
Just send me a message with your name and email address and something to
let me know that you want to be entered in the giveaway. (Gushing professions of adoration for me
and/or my work is optional.) Unfortunately,
I’m going to have to limit the giveaway to US entrants only, so why not tell me
what state you’re from when you enter? I’ll
select the winner randomly on August 1st (that should give everyone
plenty of time to enter). I’ll announce
the winner on my Facebook page and website newsfeed and contact him or her via
email to find out where I should mail the books.
That’s all there is to it.
Of course, you’re always more than welcome to join/like/follow/share all
my pages and write honest reviews of my work.
And for more about the books in this giveaway, check out http://www.HarmonUniverse.com/templeoftheblind.
Thank you and good luck!
way to celebrate the completion of The
Temple of the Blind. It is, after
all, a celebration-worthy achievement, I think.
It’s been more than twelve years since I first put pen to paper and
scratched out the first rough chapter of The
Box. This sixth book represents the
culmination of all that time and work. I
want to do something special. And I want
to do something that will include all my fans.
After a little thought, I decided that I could think of no better way to
celebrate than to finally hold my first giveaway. In fact, I’ll be holding more than one.
If you’ve been following me on Facebook or checking the newsfeed
over on my website, you already know that I’ll be giving away a free signed
copy of the new paperback over at Goodreads.com. (If you’re not following me on Facebook,
now’s a good time to sneak over there and like my page, https://www.facebook.com/BrianHarmonBooks,
before anyone notices.) Signup is open
until July 16. You can find all the
details at http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/53439-the-judgment-of-the-sentinels.
I’m also holding a second giveaway right here on Dark Things Rising. Starting today, you can enter to win the
ENTIRE SIX-BOOK SET of The Temple of the
Blind book series, signed by yours truly.
These six paperbacks are 5.25x8 inch format, retailing at a combined
price of $90.94 plus shipping, entirely FREE for one lucky fan. How does that sound?
So what do you have to do to be eligible to win this awesome
prize? I puzzled over this part for a
while. After all, this is a great
opportunity to encourage fans to help me build my online presence. I could ask you to join the blog (that little
“join this site” button over on the right-hand column). You could like my Facebook page (same link as
the one above). You could follow me on
Twitter (@HarmonUniverse). You could
share the link to my website with all your friends or write reviews for my
books at your favorite online bookstore.
But that all seems like a lot of trouble, so I’ll just ask you to head
over to my website contact form (http://www.HarmonUniverse.com/contactme)
and join my mailing list. I’ll need your
name and email address anyway to contact you if you win. And you don’t have to worry about me spamming
you or selling your address or signing you up for erectile dysfunction
newsletters or…you know…anything like that.
I only use my mailing list to inform my fans of new and upcoming
releases and maybe future giveaways, too.
Just send me a message with your name and email address and something to
let me know that you want to be entered in the giveaway. (Gushing professions of adoration for me
and/or my work is optional.) Unfortunately,
I’m going to have to limit the giveaway to US entrants only, so why not tell me
what state you’re from when you enter? I’ll
select the winner randomly on August 1st (that should give everyone
plenty of time to enter). I’ll announce
the winner on my Facebook page and website newsfeed and contact him or her via
email to find out where I should mail the books.
That’s all there is to it.
Of course, you’re always more than welcome to join/like/follow/share all
my pages and write honest reviews of my work.
And for more about the books in this giveaway, check out http://www.HarmonUniverse.com/templeoftheblind.
Thank you and good luck!
April 19, 2013
BOOK SIX of THE TEMPLE OF THE BLIND on its way!
After a slight delay, I've finally managed to finish the final book in my horror-adventure series. While it's not ready quite yet (I still have to format it and wait for my proofreaders) it is close enough to announce that the book will be available in May! I can't say precisely when in May...so I guess we'll just say "by the 31st." A few people have contacted me asking for a release date. Some of them were told February, others were told April. If you were one of those people, I sincerely apologize. I simply didn't realize how much work I had left to do. (The pitfalls of independent publishing.) But you can get your first glimpse of the book right now!
The Judgment of the Sentinels tips the scales as the series heavyweight at over 90,000 words and brings to a satisfying close the epic journey of Albert and Brandy and friends that began two years ago when I first published The Box on Smashwords. I've collected a lot of reviews on Amazon, in that time (over 50!) and a sizeable majority of those reviews tell me that my readers really like my books! Hopefully, we will have a long and happy future together!
What follows is a brief excerpt from the book. In the past, I've simply posted the first chapter or two, but I've cut this one down so as not to give away too much of what happened in book 5, because the absence of my name on the New York Times Bestsellers List is a pretty decent indication that not everyone has read it yet. Of course, if you're really concerned about spoilers, you might still want to stop here and go finish the other five books.
The Temple of the Blind was more than any of them had ever dreamed. But all of it, from the first sentinel statues with their grotesque proportions and empty, featureless faces, to the tower with its vast belly full of fire, was only gray stone and shadow. What awaited them at the end of this final passage was far more.
A soft glow greeted them as they approached, like the first light of a new day. But it was no sunrise. They emerged from the labyrinth and stood beneath a sky that was as black and as empty as the tunnels they had left behind them. Rising into this pitch-black sky was a great, gray mountain. The light was coming not from the horizon, lending hope to some distant sun, but from the mountain itself. Columns of fire blazed from hundreds of unseen vents in the stone, illuminating its rocky face in an angry undulation of light and shadow, and from its highest peak spewed a towering inferno of orange and yellow flames.
More fires rose up from cracks in the ground on either side of them, scattering the shadows at their feet and lending a dreadful hue to the path on which they walked. It was as if they had finally descended all the way down into the blazing pits of hell.
“Where are we?” asked Nicole. “What is this place?”
“The Temple of the Blind,” Albert replied, still staring up at the burning mountain. It was the most frightful place he had ever seen, far more terrifying than any scene from any movie. “It’s inside there. All of it. This is what it looks like from outside.”
Brandy gazed up at the mountain, confused. “But the Temple of the Blind is underground…”
“In our world, maybe. Not here.”
Andrea turned in a circle, her wide eyes taking everything in. “We’re in a different world?”
“We’re in the Wood,” said Olivia, her voice edged with unmistakable anxiety.
“How can you tell?” asked Nicole.
“It has the same sky.”
All of them lifted their faces toward the darkness above them. It could have been nothing more than an overcast night sky, but it wasn’t. Peering up, they could somehow tell that it was utterly empty. An eternal abyss filled the heavens here, and looking into it was deeply unsettling.
“I don’t like it here,” Brandy decided.
“You don’t get used to it,” Olivia assured her. She recalled cowering beneath the fallen night trees, staring out into this perpetually empty darkness, trying to decide if a place this black could really exist or if she had been struck blind in her fall through the branches.
Last time she looked into this sky, Wayne came to rescue her. It broke her heart to know that he wouldn’t be coming again.
Albert scanned the landscape. A pool of rippling water stood between them and the rocky terrain at the base of the mountain. The smooth, right-angle edges of the temple’s interior were not apparent here. This stone was raw, rough, indistinguishable from any other natural formation except for the fire belching from it.
These flames also illuminated the road ahead. It surged from fissures in the stone, hot columns of fire reaching for the sky, lighting the way so that, for the first time since he descended into the steam tunnels the previous evening, he did not need a flashlight to see.
But Albert found little comfort in the light. Inside that mountain was coiled every passage they had traveled during the night, and countless more they never glimpsed. He thought of all that they’d already been through, all that they’d accomplished. And still there was no end in sight. How much farther would they be forced to go? How much more would they have to endure?
...
“What are we supposed to do next?” asked Olivia.”
“Good question,” replied Albert. “Follow the path, I guess. See where it takes us.”
“The Sentinel Queen’s doorway?” wondered Andrea.
“It’s a fair assumption,” reasoned Albert. “Somewhere on this mountain, I guess.”
Nicole groaned. “I don’t want to. I’m exhausted.”
Everyone was.
Brandy checked her watch and saw that it was already lunch time. “I’m starving.”
“Me too,” said Nicole.
Olivia was hungry, too, but she didn’t want to say so. It hadn’t slipped her attention that she was by far the chubbiest person here. The last thing she wanted was to be the fat girl whining for food.
She hated that they had to be naked. Why? What was the reason? Was it just to torture them? Was everythingjust to torture them?
“I’m mostly thirsty,” said Andrea. “Do you think the water’s safe to drink?”
“I have no idea,” replied Albert as he took some cleaning wipes from the first aid kit. He didn’t think he’d want to drink the water here. Who knew what might be in it?
“The water is safe.”
All five of them turned at the sound of this new voice to find the Keeper standing with them, half-concealed in the shadows with its back to the rocks, as if it’d been there all along and they simply hadn’t noticed.
Olivia let out a startled scream and leapt to her feet, covering herself as if embarrassed to be caught naked out here. Andrea sprang to her feet as well, ready to run, although she somehow managed not to scream. Though they had both listened to Albert’s description of the strange little creature back inside the labyrinth, neither of them had actually seen the Keeper with her own eyes until now. There was simply no way to prepare for a sight as strange as this. Even Albert, Brandy and Nicole, who had already once weathered the shock of its creepy appearance, were startled to their feet by the abruptness of this unexpected visit.
Clearly, the Keeper wasn’t one to call first.
“How did you get here?” Albert asked the little creature. He didn’t think it was possible to go back the way they came, and he thought that was the only way out of the labyrinth.
Like before, its voice was clear, but broken and hoarse. Even its vocal cords did not seem to be human. “I didn’t.”
This reply caught Albert off guard. It didn’t make sense. “What?”
Also like before, its head began to rotate, its chin circling toward the black sky, the crown of its head toward the ground. “It’s unimportant.”
“Of course it is.” Brandy and Nicole crowded behind him, peering over his shoulders. Nearby, Olivia and Andrea stood side-by-side as well, ready to bolt should the unusual creature with the oversized skin and the strange little head that tilted on the wrong axis suddenly decide to bare vicious fangs and charge at them. All four remained silent, leaving Albert to address the Keeper alone.
“Why are you here, then?”
“I’m here to ensure that you finish your journey.”
Albert cocked his head, confused. “Oh. Okay. Well, we didn’t exactly think we had a choice in the matter at this point.”
“I had no doubt you would keep going,” the Keeper clarified. “What I remain unsure of is whether you can survive to reach the top.”
“So we don’t exactly have your full confidence, then. How reassuring.”
Brandy gripped his arm. Albert sounded angry and she was afraid for him. They still had no idea what this “Keeper” was or what its intentions might be. But at the same time, he deserved to be angry. This was all so frustrating.
“The path ahead is treacherous,” explained the Keeper. It now wore its face sideways. Its left ear was aimed at the ground. The loose flesh protruding from its jowls and forehead distorted grotesquely as it slid across its features, heeding the pull of gravity. The shriveled mass of dark flesh dangling from its chin jiggled with each word it spoke. “You will be tested.”
“Why?” asked Albert. “Why are we here? What’s the purpose?”
“The purpose is simply to reach the doorway at the top of the mountain.”
“Is that all?”
“You are the final pieces in an ancient design,” the Keeper explained. “Long ago, long before mankind ever set foot in your world, a race of creatures you now call ‘the sentinels’ passed judgment on all mankind. But they, Those Without Faces, did not share their judgment.”
“What kind of judgment?” Albert demanded. “Who were the sentinels?”
Now the Keeper’s face was upside-down, the flesh of its forehead hanging toward the ground, its black eyes staring at him. That hideous mass of wrinkled flesh lay against its left cheek. “The Faceless Ones were the last guardians of man.”
“‘Last guardians of man…’” repeated Albert. “What does that even mean?”
“The sentinels were the architects who made possible the survival of humanity beyond the expiration of their original world. They built the gateways and orchestrated the exoduses that allowed you all to be here today.”
“We really came from another world?” asked Andrea.
“Humans have made several worlds their own over the ages. You have no idea how ancient your species is.”
This was a lot to take in. Albert struggled to understand it all. Other worlds. Ancient races. Mysterious judgments. “So… We’ve outlived whole worlds?”
The little creature’s head began rotating again, returning to its upright position. “That’s correct.”
“And the sentinels were the ones who moved us to new worlds each time ours died?”
“They were also the ones who decided if mankind should be allowedto survive.”
Albert considered this. It was all starting to fall into place. A little. “Okay. So… Those fourteen women the Sentinel Queen told us about… They were sent through this temple from our last world?”
“Yes.”
Emboldened by the fact that the creature did not seem to want to drink their blood, Andrea took a tentative step toward it, trying to see it better. It was the strangest thing she’d ever laid eyes on.
Startled, Olivia seized her by the arm and pulled her back.
“The sentinels sent those women here,” said Albert.
“This was the doorway to the new world during the last exodus,” confirmed the Keeper. “And also the next.”
“The next?”
“This very mountain, this temple, that facilitated the journey of the mothers into the new world, is also the key that will ultimately open the way to the nextworld. Unless the judgment of the faceless ones deemed your race unworthy.”
Albert stood silently, considering this. Salvation or doom, all depending on the whims of a race of long dead, faceless freaks. It wasn’t entirely surprising. After all, he’d heard this argument already tonight. “The Sentinel Queen and that old man—”
“Yes,” interrupted the Keeper. “The Mother and the Ancient One. They both had their roles to play in bringing you here. But it’s not they who must decide. It’s you.”
It made sense now. The Sentinel Queen believed that humanity’s only chance at salvation was the opening of the doorway. The old man, the one she claimed was the devil, believed opening the doorway would only bring doom. This was what they were talking about, this judgment of the sentinels. “So what are we supposed to do, exactly?”
The Keeper’s face returned to its upright position and then continued rotating, its chin swiveling toward the sky in the opposite direction this time. “You are here to finish what the sentinels began. They passed their judgment on you long before you were ever born. Now you must pass your judgment on them long after they’ve died. You must decide for yourselves to open the door that awaits you atop this Temple of the Blind.”
“And if we decide wrong?” Albert asked.
“Even I don’t know that,” the Keeper replied. “Many people have tried to walk the road that you’ve taken to get here, people from all over the world. At first they were following the stories handed down to them throughout history, from the mouths of the mothers themselves. Later, when the truth had faded into myth and was eventually forgotten altogether, only those with the old gifts were able to feel the pull of the doorway, people like Wendell Gilbert and Beverly Bridger.” The creature’s head was upside-down again. Its stare was dull, but piercing. “Many have come over the ages. And all of them have died. Until now.”
Albert remembered the bones in the round room with the battered sentinels, the scattered remains of those who did not have the box to guide them.
“You are here…” the Keeper lifted one skinny hand and pointed up at the burning peak of the temple, its loose flesh dangling like the sleeves of an oversized shirt, “…to go there. Your entire world is balancing on the razor’s edge of the actions you’ve taken and will take on this journey.”
“No pressure…” grumbled Nicole.
“Your world could end today,” said the Keeper, “or it could live on for thousands more years. But it will end. Humanity may die with it. Or it may live beyond it. It depends entirely upon the judgment the sentinels passed upon you. And it depends upon the judgment you will pass upon them.”
“I don’t understand,” said Olivia.
“It doesn’t matter.” The Keeper turned its head ninety degrees and held it there, its ears pointing up and down. “You don’t have to understand. You only have to choose.”
Albert wanted to know more. He wanted the Keeper to explain these things that it had said to them, but it vanished before their eyes, withdrawing into the very rock behind it, as though sucked back into the darkness from which it came.
“Where did it go?” Andrea asked.
“I’m not the only one who found that whole thing weird, am I?” asked Olivia.
“What about that was weird?” quipped Nicole. “The freaky little Muppet thing just told us we have to choose the fate of the world.”
“That’s really messed up,” said Andrea. She walked over to where the Keeper had been standing, trying to figure out how it had come and gone.
Albert looked around at his four lovely companions and sighed. “Well, everybody, Brandy might have a broken tailbone, Nicole’s got a hole in her hand and I’ve got a broken arm. Who’s up for some mountain climbing?”
Look for The Judgment of the Sentinels at Smashwords, Barnes & Noble and Amazon in May! And check back soon for more updates and to find out what I'll be doing once The Temple of the Blind is behind me.
The Judgment of the Sentinels tips the scales as the series heavyweight at over 90,000 words and brings to a satisfying close the epic journey of Albert and Brandy and friends that began two years ago when I first published The Box on Smashwords. I've collected a lot of reviews on Amazon, in that time (over 50!) and a sizeable majority of those reviews tell me that my readers really like my books! Hopefully, we will have a long and happy future together!
What follows is a brief excerpt from the book. In the past, I've simply posted the first chapter or two, but I've cut this one down so as not to give away too much of what happened in book 5, because the absence of my name on the New York Times Bestsellers List is a pretty decent indication that not everyone has read it yet. Of course, if you're really concerned about spoilers, you might still want to stop here and go finish the other five books.
The Temple of the Blind was more than any of them had ever dreamed. But all of it, from the first sentinel statues with their grotesque proportions and empty, featureless faces, to the tower with its vast belly full of fire, was only gray stone and shadow. What awaited them at the end of this final passage was far more.
A soft glow greeted them as they approached, like the first light of a new day. But it was no sunrise. They emerged from the labyrinth and stood beneath a sky that was as black and as empty as the tunnels they had left behind them. Rising into this pitch-black sky was a great, gray mountain. The light was coming not from the horizon, lending hope to some distant sun, but from the mountain itself. Columns of fire blazed from hundreds of unseen vents in the stone, illuminating its rocky face in an angry undulation of light and shadow, and from its highest peak spewed a towering inferno of orange and yellow flames.
More fires rose up from cracks in the ground on either side of them, scattering the shadows at their feet and lending a dreadful hue to the path on which they walked. It was as if they had finally descended all the way down into the blazing pits of hell.
“Where are we?” asked Nicole. “What is this place?”
“The Temple of the Blind,” Albert replied, still staring up at the burning mountain. It was the most frightful place he had ever seen, far more terrifying than any scene from any movie. “It’s inside there. All of it. This is what it looks like from outside.”
Brandy gazed up at the mountain, confused. “But the Temple of the Blind is underground…”
“In our world, maybe. Not here.”
Andrea turned in a circle, her wide eyes taking everything in. “We’re in a different world?”
“We’re in the Wood,” said Olivia, her voice edged with unmistakable anxiety.
“How can you tell?” asked Nicole.
“It has the same sky.”
All of them lifted their faces toward the darkness above them. It could have been nothing more than an overcast night sky, but it wasn’t. Peering up, they could somehow tell that it was utterly empty. An eternal abyss filled the heavens here, and looking into it was deeply unsettling.
“I don’t like it here,” Brandy decided.
“You don’t get used to it,” Olivia assured her. She recalled cowering beneath the fallen night trees, staring out into this perpetually empty darkness, trying to decide if a place this black could really exist or if she had been struck blind in her fall through the branches.
Last time she looked into this sky, Wayne came to rescue her. It broke her heart to know that he wouldn’t be coming again.
Albert scanned the landscape. A pool of rippling water stood between them and the rocky terrain at the base of the mountain. The smooth, right-angle edges of the temple’s interior were not apparent here. This stone was raw, rough, indistinguishable from any other natural formation except for the fire belching from it.
These flames also illuminated the road ahead. It surged from fissures in the stone, hot columns of fire reaching for the sky, lighting the way so that, for the first time since he descended into the steam tunnels the previous evening, he did not need a flashlight to see.
But Albert found little comfort in the light. Inside that mountain was coiled every passage they had traveled during the night, and countless more they never glimpsed. He thought of all that they’d already been through, all that they’d accomplished. And still there was no end in sight. How much farther would they be forced to go? How much more would they have to endure?
...
“What are we supposed to do next?” asked Olivia.”
“Good question,” replied Albert. “Follow the path, I guess. See where it takes us.”
“The Sentinel Queen’s doorway?” wondered Andrea.
“It’s a fair assumption,” reasoned Albert. “Somewhere on this mountain, I guess.”
Nicole groaned. “I don’t want to. I’m exhausted.”
Everyone was.
Brandy checked her watch and saw that it was already lunch time. “I’m starving.”
“Me too,” said Nicole.
Olivia was hungry, too, but she didn’t want to say so. It hadn’t slipped her attention that she was by far the chubbiest person here. The last thing she wanted was to be the fat girl whining for food.
She hated that they had to be naked. Why? What was the reason? Was it just to torture them? Was everythingjust to torture them?
“I’m mostly thirsty,” said Andrea. “Do you think the water’s safe to drink?”
“I have no idea,” replied Albert as he took some cleaning wipes from the first aid kit. He didn’t think he’d want to drink the water here. Who knew what might be in it?
“The water is safe.”
All five of them turned at the sound of this new voice to find the Keeper standing with them, half-concealed in the shadows with its back to the rocks, as if it’d been there all along and they simply hadn’t noticed.
Olivia let out a startled scream and leapt to her feet, covering herself as if embarrassed to be caught naked out here. Andrea sprang to her feet as well, ready to run, although she somehow managed not to scream. Though they had both listened to Albert’s description of the strange little creature back inside the labyrinth, neither of them had actually seen the Keeper with her own eyes until now. There was simply no way to prepare for a sight as strange as this. Even Albert, Brandy and Nicole, who had already once weathered the shock of its creepy appearance, were startled to their feet by the abruptness of this unexpected visit.
Clearly, the Keeper wasn’t one to call first.
“How did you get here?” Albert asked the little creature. He didn’t think it was possible to go back the way they came, and he thought that was the only way out of the labyrinth.
Like before, its voice was clear, but broken and hoarse. Even its vocal cords did not seem to be human. “I didn’t.”
This reply caught Albert off guard. It didn’t make sense. “What?”
Also like before, its head began to rotate, its chin circling toward the black sky, the crown of its head toward the ground. “It’s unimportant.”
“Of course it is.” Brandy and Nicole crowded behind him, peering over his shoulders. Nearby, Olivia and Andrea stood side-by-side as well, ready to bolt should the unusual creature with the oversized skin and the strange little head that tilted on the wrong axis suddenly decide to bare vicious fangs and charge at them. All four remained silent, leaving Albert to address the Keeper alone.
“Why are you here, then?”
“I’m here to ensure that you finish your journey.”
Albert cocked his head, confused. “Oh. Okay. Well, we didn’t exactly think we had a choice in the matter at this point.”
“I had no doubt you would keep going,” the Keeper clarified. “What I remain unsure of is whether you can survive to reach the top.”
“So we don’t exactly have your full confidence, then. How reassuring.”
Brandy gripped his arm. Albert sounded angry and she was afraid for him. They still had no idea what this “Keeper” was or what its intentions might be. But at the same time, he deserved to be angry. This was all so frustrating.
“The path ahead is treacherous,” explained the Keeper. It now wore its face sideways. Its left ear was aimed at the ground. The loose flesh protruding from its jowls and forehead distorted grotesquely as it slid across its features, heeding the pull of gravity. The shriveled mass of dark flesh dangling from its chin jiggled with each word it spoke. “You will be tested.”
“Why?” asked Albert. “Why are we here? What’s the purpose?”
“The purpose is simply to reach the doorway at the top of the mountain.”
“Is that all?”
“You are the final pieces in an ancient design,” the Keeper explained. “Long ago, long before mankind ever set foot in your world, a race of creatures you now call ‘the sentinels’ passed judgment on all mankind. But they, Those Without Faces, did not share their judgment.”
“What kind of judgment?” Albert demanded. “Who were the sentinels?”
Now the Keeper’s face was upside-down, the flesh of its forehead hanging toward the ground, its black eyes staring at him. That hideous mass of wrinkled flesh lay against its left cheek. “The Faceless Ones were the last guardians of man.”
“‘Last guardians of man…’” repeated Albert. “What does that even mean?”
“The sentinels were the architects who made possible the survival of humanity beyond the expiration of their original world. They built the gateways and orchestrated the exoduses that allowed you all to be here today.”
“We really came from another world?” asked Andrea.
“Humans have made several worlds their own over the ages. You have no idea how ancient your species is.”
This was a lot to take in. Albert struggled to understand it all. Other worlds. Ancient races. Mysterious judgments. “So… We’ve outlived whole worlds?”
The little creature’s head began rotating again, returning to its upright position. “That’s correct.”
“And the sentinels were the ones who moved us to new worlds each time ours died?”
“They were also the ones who decided if mankind should be allowedto survive.”
Albert considered this. It was all starting to fall into place. A little. “Okay. So… Those fourteen women the Sentinel Queen told us about… They were sent through this temple from our last world?”
“Yes.”
Emboldened by the fact that the creature did not seem to want to drink their blood, Andrea took a tentative step toward it, trying to see it better. It was the strangest thing she’d ever laid eyes on.
Startled, Olivia seized her by the arm and pulled her back.
“The sentinels sent those women here,” said Albert.
“This was the doorway to the new world during the last exodus,” confirmed the Keeper. “And also the next.”
“The next?”
“This very mountain, this temple, that facilitated the journey of the mothers into the new world, is also the key that will ultimately open the way to the nextworld. Unless the judgment of the faceless ones deemed your race unworthy.”
Albert stood silently, considering this. Salvation or doom, all depending on the whims of a race of long dead, faceless freaks. It wasn’t entirely surprising. After all, he’d heard this argument already tonight. “The Sentinel Queen and that old man—”
“Yes,” interrupted the Keeper. “The Mother and the Ancient One. They both had their roles to play in bringing you here. But it’s not they who must decide. It’s you.”
It made sense now. The Sentinel Queen believed that humanity’s only chance at salvation was the opening of the doorway. The old man, the one she claimed was the devil, believed opening the doorway would only bring doom. This was what they were talking about, this judgment of the sentinels. “So what are we supposed to do, exactly?”
The Keeper’s face returned to its upright position and then continued rotating, its chin swiveling toward the sky in the opposite direction this time. “You are here to finish what the sentinels began. They passed their judgment on you long before you were ever born. Now you must pass your judgment on them long after they’ve died. You must decide for yourselves to open the door that awaits you atop this Temple of the Blind.”
“And if we decide wrong?” Albert asked.
“Even I don’t know that,” the Keeper replied. “Many people have tried to walk the road that you’ve taken to get here, people from all over the world. At first they were following the stories handed down to them throughout history, from the mouths of the mothers themselves. Later, when the truth had faded into myth and was eventually forgotten altogether, only those with the old gifts were able to feel the pull of the doorway, people like Wendell Gilbert and Beverly Bridger.” The creature’s head was upside-down again. Its stare was dull, but piercing. “Many have come over the ages. And all of them have died. Until now.”
Albert remembered the bones in the round room with the battered sentinels, the scattered remains of those who did not have the box to guide them.
“You are here…” the Keeper lifted one skinny hand and pointed up at the burning peak of the temple, its loose flesh dangling like the sleeves of an oversized shirt, “…to go there. Your entire world is balancing on the razor’s edge of the actions you’ve taken and will take on this journey.”
“No pressure…” grumbled Nicole.
“Your world could end today,” said the Keeper, “or it could live on for thousands more years. But it will end. Humanity may die with it. Or it may live beyond it. It depends entirely upon the judgment the sentinels passed upon you. And it depends upon the judgment you will pass upon them.”
“I don’t understand,” said Olivia.
“It doesn’t matter.” The Keeper turned its head ninety degrees and held it there, its ears pointing up and down. “You don’t have to understand. You only have to choose.”
Albert wanted to know more. He wanted the Keeper to explain these things that it had said to them, but it vanished before their eyes, withdrawing into the very rock behind it, as though sucked back into the darkness from which it came.
“Where did it go?” Andrea asked.
“I’m not the only one who found that whole thing weird, am I?” asked Olivia.
“What about that was weird?” quipped Nicole. “The freaky little Muppet thing just told us we have to choose the fate of the world.”
“That’s really messed up,” said Andrea. She walked over to where the Keeper had been standing, trying to figure out how it had come and gone.
Albert looked around at his four lovely companions and sighed. “Well, everybody, Brandy might have a broken tailbone, Nicole’s got a hole in her hand and I’ve got a broken arm. Who’s up for some mountain climbing?”
Look for The Judgment of the Sentinels at Smashwords, Barnes & Noble and Amazon in May! And check back soon for more updates and to find out what I'll be doing once The Temple of the Blind is behind me.
January 10, 2013
Getting Dirty
Due to underwhelming sales, I’ve decided to remove my work
from circulation and turn my efforts toward a more profitable genre. After doing some lazy and rather unreliable research,
I’ve discovered that erotica appears to draw considerably more readers than
horror and suspense, according to these guys on some forum I read. As a result, the following changes have been
made:
From now on, The Box will
be The Package and will be followed
by its sequels, Gilbert’s House, The Dimples of the Blonde, Rod Receives the Wood, and Secret of the Librarian. I have also made improvements to my short
stories. “The Man in the Fire,” after appropriate
changes, will now be “The Man in the Fireman’s Hat.” “Jeremy Fell” is now “Jeremy Felt” and “Low
Tide” has become “Low Clyde.” Also, “Children
in the Dark” has been changed to “Chillin’ in the Dark.” With full credit to my clever wife, “The
Devil’s Walk” will hereby be re-titled “The Devil’s Banana.”
“From Such Small Things” will keep its title.
Also look forward to my brand new, full-length and frisky
adventure, Blushed. Available soon.
Thank you for understanding.
(I should probably confirm at this point that this is, in
fact, a joke and that I will not
actually be removing any of my current titles from publication and replacing
them with silly smut. Otherwise, someone
out there will send me an angry
e-mail demanding that I deliver “The Devil’s Banana” promptly or be sued for
false advertising.)
Check out all my (real) titles at http://www.amazon.com/Brian-Harmon/e/B004YYT16W
and share this address with your friends.
Don’t let this reality come to pass!
