Hooks

Our newest “HOOK” is by:

Ann Wahlman spent her formative years in New England. She now resides in Baltimore, Maryland, where she has lived for the past seven years. Ann holds a degree in Psychology from The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC and is planning to pursue a Masters in Writing.

When I was a boy, my family lived out in Minnesota in a town by the name of Adrian, about halfway between Worthington and Luverne, where the soft undulating hills gave way to the wide open expanse of the prairie. The grasses would rise up gold in the late summer, the autumn sun drying them out to a pale silver-gold while the wind whipped the dust up off the ground and threw it into your eyes. Old Man Winter would come hard and fast, blanketing the state and our little town in snow until the massive lands seemed frozen in time. The winter thaw always gave way to the spring, where trees would awake and bud, the grasses thrust their way out of the wet earth, and animals forego their winter hibernation. In summer it was so green you could smell it — a rich, verdant bed of grass as far as the eye could see. Each season had its own look, like the ladies in town that had a different type of frippery for each day of the week.

The country was just recovering from the Great Depression in the 1930s. Our Ma didn’t have any of the fine frocks that the ladies in town had, but that didn’t seem to bother her one bit. She had a saying that went “food before finery”, and that was one thing we could always count on – we would have food in our bellies, even if we didn’t have shoes on our feet.

Our Pa was a cattle rancher, unlike his father who had worked laying the tracks of the St. Paul Railroad Company that still ran through our small town. Pa was the silent type, as stoic as the tall juniper tree in our backyard. Its branches only wavered when the wind blew something awful, and even then the branches would only give the slightest quiver. When Pa quivered, we knew he meant business.

Things were a lot different back in those days. Like many of our neighbors, we weren’t wired for electricity yet and we lacked indoor plumbing. The outhouse in our backyard was sweltering in the summer — a stench that would make you gag even if you held your breath, and colder than a witch’s tit in the middle of winter. During those two seasons you could set your watch by our lightning fast trips to the john.

Like most families in Adrian, ours was both German and Catholic – though we were also part Irish, thanks to Ma. I was the middle child of five, smack between two older twin sisters, and a younger brother and sister. As the eldest boy in our family, I had a lot of responsibility even at the age of seven. My younger siblings — Mary, aged three, and Walter, five —fell to my care once they became toddlers. The only time I wasn’t required to look after my younger siblings was after school when I went hunting, or when I was helping Pa out on the ranch. Caroline and Hannah — both aged ten — helped Ma out with the chickens, the housework, the gardening, and other kitchen duties deemed unfit for a boy my age.

In those days, you could bring your shotgun to school and sling it right on the coatrack with your coat, and no one raised so much as an eyebrow if a young boy had a pocketknife in his desk. So it was that one afternoon in the spring of 1937, Billy and I had our shotguns slung over our shoulders as we walked alongside each other, slopping through mud and kicking stones along the path on our way to our hunting grounds — a thicket of trees nestled into the side of a hill not far from the school house. It was late in April and the weather had turned a few weeks back. The snow had melted, funneling itself into the creek bed with such speed that what was normally a trickle in late summer was now fast rapids. The first spring grasses were pushing their way out of the thin crust of snow that was left and the trees had just begun to show the first buds of spring.

Billy and I were playing cowboys and Indians, firing off imaginary rounds at each other and arguing over who would play John Wayne. Billy carelessly swung his rifle toward me, and there was a loud crack as the ammunition discharged from the barrel. We were familiar enough with our guns to know the sound, but it still scared the devil out of both of us. I’d never known what it was like to get shot at before, but suddenly I knew more than I’d ever wanted to know about it. It hurt like the dickens — a burning, searing pain hotter than the hottest day I’d ever spent fanning myself in the shade while the cicadas chirruped loudly in my ears.

“Harry!” Billy yelled, the fear rising in his voice. “Harry, are you all right?”

I hollered something awful back at him.

He dropped his shotgun as if it were a red-hot branding iron and came running at me, skidding to a stop on his knees by my side.

“Aw hell, Billy! You shot me!” I held my hand out to him to show him my mangled paw. The buckshot had nicked up my left hand and had taken off the tip of my thumb.

“Oh, sweet mother of Mary,” he breathed. “It was an accident, I swear!”

“Don’t you dare use the Lord’s name in vain. My mother’ll get a switch if she so much as hears you breathe it.”

“Oh, Harry… Oh, that looks bad,” he said, inspecting it a little closer.

“Well quit gawking at it and let me get home to my mother,” I said, a little irritably.

He paled at the mention of my mother — she had a reputation that wasn’t at all exaggerated.

“You’re not gonna tell, are you?”

“If I show up with my thumb half blown to bits, you think she won’t ask?”

“She’ll tell my mother, Harry. They’ll take my gun away!” Billy loved that gun like a girl, that is, if he had a girl — which I knew he didn’t.

I rummaged in my coat pocket with my good hand for my white handkerchief and wrapped it around my hand. Blood soaked through it almost immediately. “Don’t worry about it, Billy. I ain’t gonna tell her you had anything to do with it. I’m gonna be in trouble anyway, so I’ll tell her it was me.” I got to my feet and slung my shotgun over my shoulder, holding my injured hand out in front of me like a priest holding the Bible at the liturgical procession. I started off towards home.

“Where are you going?” he called after me.

“Home. Where do you think?” I said. “You’d better run on home yourself now. I’ll see you at school tomorrow.”

I left him there standing next to his beloved shotgun — lying neglected in the dirt.

Ma was in the kitchen with my older sisters. I stepped into the kitchen doorway and the beginnings of dinner wafted to my nose, making my stomach growl. They were working on some dough, rolling it out and cutting out shapes, piling the scraps back up to be rolled out again. My mother, blessedly, had her back to me.

“What took you so long, Harry?” she asked, her attention on the dough rather than on me.

“Ma, I…”

I was just working out how best to tell her when Caroline caught sight of the blood-soaked handkerchief. Her eyes went wide and I shot her a warning look that begged her not to scream — but she screamed. My mother turned around to see me standing there, silent, bloody, looking scared — and a whole host of terrible things likely went through her mind.

“Lord have mercy!” she said as she dropped her rolling pin onto the floor. It made a thud against the wooden floors and rolled to her feet. She ignored it completely and rushed to my side. “Oh Harry, are you all right? What happened?”

“I’m fine, Ma. I just…” I looked down at my hand. “I done shot my hand.”

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“I’ll need to see the doctor,” I said, trying to sound calm. “But I won’t die or nothing.”

She straightened up a little, being assured of my continued existence — though her switch might end me after the doctor had stitched me up. “Well, let’s see that hand,” she said.

I unwrapped it for her and she had a look, clucking her tongue at the shame of it all. Without a moment’s hesitation she put on her coat and her hat, ordered the girls to mind the house and finish dinner, and ushered me down the steps to the Chevrolet Six they had bought the year I was born. They had gotten it brand-new, and although it was seven — going on eight — years old, it was still running fine thanks to Pa’s careful maintenance. It was still better than riding horseback down to Dr. Adler’s house with my hand throbbing with each sway of the saddle, but as the little Chevy bounced and rolled its way down the dirt road, I was starting to think it wasn’t all that much better.

Dr. Adler’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Evelyn, met us at the door and showed us into her father’s office. I was sure she was used to seeing some pretty horrifying things being a doctor’s daughter and all, and her father having his practice out of his house, but she seemed white-faced and terrified. Dr. Adler came in, all business, and took a look at my hand. He picked out what buckshot he could and cleaned it up, but he hesitated with a frown as he looked at my thumb.

“Mrs. Persig, I can try to save the thumb if you like. But I’m concerned about gangrene. Otherwise, I’ll have to amputate the portion above the knuckle and stitch it back up.”

I didn’t understand half of the words the doctor had said, but I knew what gangrene was from Pa’s stories about the war — and it scared me.

Ma pressed her lips together in a frown and looked at me critically. “If he’s old enough to shoot his fool thumb off, he’s old enough to decide how to fix it,” she said. She folded her arms across her chest and stared me down.

Dr. Adler looked at my mother carefully. “Mrs. Persig?” he asked.

“It’s his decision,” she insisted. She nodded her head in my direction, not even bothering to look at him.

The doctor looked at me with his eyebrows raised. I don’t think he’d ever heard of a mother letting her son make such a choice. “Harry?” he asked, finally.

I looked at my mother, and returned my gaze back to him. I set my chin and gave them both a nod of my head to make sure they knew I meant business.

“Take it off,” I said.

You know the drill, reader.  Leave your comments and feedback for Ann!

This piece is an intro to a larger work by Jenn Ouellette.  You can read more of her work at her blog, Jenn at Juggling Life and Jenn’s a contributor and editor over at The Women’s Colony.  You know the drill, read it and leave her feedback!

Midlife (a stage in which I’m solidly entrenched) is the time when we start to reflect upon our lives. We are no longer worrying about becoming who we are meant to be; we are that person—for good, for bad, for real. Which is not to say that we can’t or won’t change in some ways; but we probably are not going to become an astronaut after all.

So we reflect, look back and measure.

How does a 46-year old woman, long-married, mother of four take the measure of her life? There are so many possibilities—education, career, husband, kids, volunteer work, hobbies, future dreams.

For an extroverted person whose milieu has always been interpersonal skills my focus lately has been on friends.

Up until about age 8 the memories are either a blur or known to me as a story told by my mother.

I know that when I was born my mother had a friend who had a baby about a month older than I was. We were playpen pals for about a year. I don’t believe there exists a photo of the two of us. I do know that my mother retained a lifelong bitterness that she couldn’t use her favorite girl’s name, Jill, for me because her friend’s baby was named Jill. Then the friend had the audacity to move away—making the accommodation all for naught.

The first friend I actually have snatches of memory about was from kindergarten and first grade. I don’t remember her name and I can’t ask my mother because she is dead. I do remember that small friend and I were the best of friends and the worst of enemies. I remember clinging hugs, hair-pulling and racing down the sidewalk on training wheels– knobby skinned knees pumping furiously and stringy, dishwater blonde hair flying behind us.

Between kindergarten and third grade we moved three times and I attended four schools. I’m sure I had friends, but not for long.

It is Leslie Heymann, my pal in third through sixth grades, whom I truly remember as my first best friend.  I think it was through my friendship with her that I realized that, like my mother, I need one really great friend at all times. Leslie’s family had plenty of money, but her parents were divorced and she was Jewish. My mother had no money, “lived in sin” with her boyfriend, and though I wasn’t Jewish it was still vividly clear that neither of us quite fit the mold of the wealthy Santa Monica neighborhood where we attended elementary school.

But we had each other, and that was more than enough.

In the 1970s two ten-year olds with bicycles and working mothers had a level of freedom my children could not dream of.  “Free-range” does not begin to describe our ability to roam.

You know the drill, read the excerpt and post a comment!  This week’s Hook is from budding author Erin Stevens.  A prolific poet and short story writer, this is her first novel.

The Accident

There are moments in life that you just can’t prepare for. That even if you could prepare, you wouldn’t know where to start. I never would’ve anticipated the event that would forever distort a good life and turn it into one of misery.

Before the accident, I thought I had a pretty good idea of who I was. Ava Carver: high school junior, reluctant member of the tennis team, hardworking but always one point short of a 4.0, even with my hours of academic labor. I was friendly enough to everyone, but no more open than I had to be. I was the new girl, the girl who had lived in four different states and attended six different schools. I wasn’t going anywhere this time– dad promised.

Anyway, I got along pretty well with my parents; especially when they vowed to let me finish high school without being uprooted. Again. My dad was a financial consultant, and he was always getting offered “bigger and better” positions every few years. He claimed it was in our family’s best interest, but I think he just got bored being stuck in the same town for more than a few years. He got me involved with tennis, and spent endless hours on the driveway drilling strategy into my brain. Naturally, I felt like I had to keep playing for him. His intentions were good though, so I didn’t have the heart to tell him I wanted to retire my tennis career.

My mother was a natural worrywart; since she didn’t work, she directed that worry at my brother, Cameron, and me. If I were a bug, then she would be the microscope, endlessly hovering over me. Both of them over-bearing, I still loved my parents. They, however, had a weird relationship. They split their attention between my brother and me so well that they practically danced around each other. No fights or huge disagreements, but no signs of affection either. I worried about what they would be like once Cameron and I weren’t there anymore.

My brother Cameron, he’s a different story. The only time either of us have ever agreed on anything was when we both begged our dad to not make us move again. He pleaded for a different reason though: hockey. His world revolved around hockey, and although he was a freshman and new to the school, he’d already proven during the summer to be the high school’s hockey prodigy. Imagine, walking down the hall as a junior, finally starting to tread water when someone approaches and says: “Hey, you’re Cameron’s sister right?” Plus, ever since his talent started to “shine through,” Cam sucked up every inch of my dad’s time. That created a lovely mixture of sibling tension.

While Cameron wanted to stay for hockey, I begged to stay because I wanted to actually make friends. I remember moving in eighth grade, already expecting to be on my own since most friendships were already established. It didn’t bother me so much anymore; I’d become independent over the years and sometimes preferred the solitude. Still, as I found myself discreetly occupying a back corner desk, I couldn’t help but hope that things would, for once, be different.

Now I’ve started at another high school for my junior year. For the first two weeks I spent lunch hours and study time observing a group of girls. They weren’t the most popular, but it was a group that I could see myself meshing with. I imagined conversations I would have with them at lunch, maybe not even talking, but sitting with a core group of friends instead of other loners would be a step up. The only friend I had was a journal, but it does nothing for social stimulation. I spent my lunch hour looking at textbooks and homework so I could get ahead in my AP classes.

My love life was… taking an indefinite vacation. I’d been on a few dates, and was asked to Homecoming the previous year at my old school (I’d been there a record of two years) by the drop– dead– gorgeous football captain Evan Mathis whom I discovered, to my embarrassment, only asked me to make one of his ex-girlfriends jealous. Then there was Nolan Reeves, the quiet, soulful boy who sat next to me in my fourth period math class at my current school. We’d barely spoken more than a few words, but I found him interesting. He always asked me for a number two pencil. Every day I always supplied it, and he always gave it back after spending an entire class period sketching. The light scratch of the pencil soothed me into a place where I didn’t feel the pain of the quadratic formula. I guess I wasn’t in too big of a rush to find “my true love,” and since I hadn’t found anyone yet, I wasn’t too worried.

All in all, everything seemed pretty good. I wasn’t ungrateful for my life; I was complacent, actually, because I knew I should be. Still, while I greeted the world with a smile, my eyes searched relentlessly for something that would satisfy me. Most people would think I was pining after the cute guy seven lockers down, or envying the girl who walked past me wearing the shirt I wanted to buy two weeks ago, but that was so far off the mark.

I was claimed by others, but I didn’t feel claimed to myself, and I was feeling an emptiness inside. I had no idea what any of this meant. Not until after, when I finally came into myself.

That’s what I was thinking about when it happened. I was trying to drown out my dad’s endless babble about training for the big tennis match the following weekend. He hadn’t come right out and said that I wasn’t playing well, but his condescending tone gave him away. He tried to make jokes after his overly critical speech, but the damage was done. I pressed my face against the cool window as I watched the world go by. I made up stories about the people we passed, each person having a piece of the life I wanted. It was in the middle of imagining the middle aged woman who looked like she was a lawyer when life threw me an unexpected curve ball.

Maybe it was that split second my Dad glanced over at me, offering an olive branch. Maybe it was the other driver who ran the red light just as we pulled through the busiest intersection in town. I heard the screaming brakes, the sound of metal against metal, horns blaring, glass shattering, and a few choice words from dad. I saw my father’s face masked in one of horror, the red, speeding bullet growing closer, and finally, my own shocked face reflected in the glass.

And then I saw nothing at all.

CHAPTER 22

Dave, Meet the Cartel

“That pinche gringo Pete has split with fifty kilos of our pot, patron,” Sanchez announced to Jesus, as he was eating lunch at a posh restaurant in Tijuana, Mexico. The drug cartel leader put down his fork and dabbed his mouth with a napkin, while his eyes grew dark and narrow.

“You know what to do, Sanchez, when you find him. Meanwhile, watch all his main dealers and do what you have to do to find this gringo son of a bitch.”

Sanchez was a trusted enforcer for the cartel, and he moved quickly to track down Pete or anyone else thought to be an accomplice. He was particularly interested in Dave, because Pete had often bragged about the jock from Escondido who sold more pot than any other dealer. Sanchez had gringo dealers all over San Diego County willing to watch Dave like a hawk, with the promise of getting Pete’s territory. It wasn’t long before word got back to Sanchez that Pete had gotten himself murdered in Tucson. The cartel rules were explicit. If you couldn’t get Pete, you got his closest associate. The rip-off could not go unpunished. At that point, Dave’s life was worthless.

A white van with FTD painted on the sides drove up to Dave’s house at about 10 p.m. A lone driver walked up to the front door and rang the bell. After a few minutes, the delivery driver tried the door handle and discovered it was unlocked. He waved to the van and two more men walked quickly to the door, where all three entered the house, holding drawn pistols.

They found Dave crashed out in his bedroom. He was quickly tied up and duct tape wrapped around his head and mouth. The men carried Dave to the van, deposited him in the back, and covered him with flowers. The abduction was quick, almost noiseless, and efficient. No one on the block heard or saw anything except for Sanchez, who was parked halfway down the block in a nondescript car. Both vehicles headed south on Highway 395 toward San Diego, and a half hour later they were headed east on Interstate 8 toward El Centro. After driving an hour and a half, the van and car crossed the Mexican border without incident and pulled into a gated compound close to San Felipe.

Dave regained enough of his senses to understand something was very wrong. He couldn’t move his hands or feet, and his mouth was bound so tightly that making a noise was impossible. David heard a garage door open as the van drove inside a building, and then the door closed noisily behind them. The men carried Dave out of the van and dumped him like a sack of shit alongside a large hole in the earthen floor of the garage. The dirt smelled putrid, and it was far worse than anything Dave had ever smelled. The men started talking in Spanish, while laughing at the teenager lying in the filthy dirt.

Dave started shaking uncontrollably and he urinated in his pants, at which point Sanchez leaned over and simply said, “Adios, gringo.” The men began kicking Dave until he fell into the hole and landed on his face and chest. He wanted to scream, but no sound could escape the tape’s grip. He felt something being poured on his back and head. Soon, the powdery substance trickled down the side of his face and caused a burning sensation so intense that Dave started to convulse like a worm in a hot frying pan. The men finished pouring the lye mixture over Dave’s convulsing body and then shoveled dirt to cover the white, squirming mound until it reached the floor level and there was no longer any movement.

Sanchez was pleased with the night’s work. He left the garage and headed for a phone booth anticipating the report he would give Jesus. Unfortunately for the parents of Dell and Dave Wilson, they would have to continue life without either of their children. Dave thought of that, just before his light faded to darkness.

You know the drill, readers–give Ann’s work a read and leave a comment for her below! Ann Wahlman’s work in progress is a Young Adult psychological thriller–you can catch more of Ann’s writing by clicking here.

On the afternoon that our new brother came home, Abby and I sat playing checkers on the window seat in the dining room. Our perch overlooked the front yard, where at any moment our parents would drive up and park Dad’s black sedan under the tree by the front porch of the three-bedroom colonial we called home. That tree held a lot of memories for us Valentines. It was the one I fell out of when I was eight and broke my right arm. It was the tree where we took cover from snowball fights in the winter, and the tree where our dad tied up a swing for Abby when she was four years old. It was that same swing she fell off of last summer and broke her leg. She hadn’t cried a bit — she was so tough when it came to things like that. I was sure that when her age, I probably would have.

On that snowy day in January, the winter sun shone bright against the new fallen snow as we hid indoors from the cold. The warmth of the rays penetrated through the window panes and soaked itself into the fabric of the sweater I wore. I pulled at the neck of my sweater and picked at the red cushion on the window seat. I captured two of Abby’s pieces in one move and she pouted at me.

“Come on, Abs. You don’t want me to let you win, do you?”

She pressed her lips together and wrinkled her nose at me, a facial expression that belied her nearly five and a half years.

“No,” she said at last. “I want to win fair and square.”

I laughed and shook my head at her. Abby was a precocious little girl, and I adored her.

“Then you’ll need to start playing smarter,” I chided her.

She put her hand out to make the next move, but caught sight out of the shiny black sedan making its way up the snowy driveway. She snatched her hand away and jumped down from the window seat, knocking over the board in the process and scattering checkers all over the floor.

“Oh, they’re here!”

“Abs!” I protested loudly. “What about our game?”

“They’re here, Jack. Forget about the silly game.” She pointed out the window impatiently.

Our father’s sedan came to a halt underneath our tree, the snowy chatter of the tires up the drive finally being silenced. The pristine white snow found itself juxtaposed against the dark car parked on top of it. I knew that I would remember today because it was an important one — just like I remembered all the other days of importance in my nearly twelve years of life.

I remembered the day that my sister had been born clearly, like a clean, crisp sheet of paper in an album with an over-saturated photograph pasted neatly at the top of the page. Underneath it the caption would read in bold, black letters: Abigail May Valentine, born August 12th. A little farther back in the album would be one of my toddler photos, taken at the local department store. There would be a blue-carpeted background against my dark hair and my deep green eyes. My mother would have dressed me in a navy sweater, since she always said it brought out my eyes. Underneath the caption would read: Jack Francis Valentine, born April 11th.

I would remember today because it was the day that Daniel came home. Daniel Thomas Eagan. He wasn’t a Valentine yet, but once the adoption papers had gone through he would be just as much a part of our family as Abby and I were. He was nine months older than me, so we were inheriting an older brother.

We watched as the car doors opened and out popped three heads. Two were the familiar ones of our mom and dad. The third was an unfamiliar reddish-brown one. He was about my height — maybe even a little taller, but I was tall for my age. He had pale ashen skin and wide eyes. I couldn’t tell what color from where we stood, but they were dark. A mass of freckles spread across his nose, which no doubt caused him endless cruelties in the schoolyard. I imagined however, that they came in handy when you were trying to look cute enough to get adopted. It had worked on my mother, at least… or rather, our mother.

As they trod up the walkway and up the steps to the house, Abby and I watched from behind the full-length glass storm door. Our mother was smiling down at Daniel, her hand on the back of his head. Our father carried a small black suitcase that could not have contained more than a dozen items of clothing even if had it been stuffed to capacity.

It was the picture of a happy family, the crust of the snow-topped trees behind them sparkling in the full winter sun. I captured the moment in my mind. The date was January 4th.

A new Hook for your consideration–leave your gut reaction/feedback/comments below!  You can read more of Wyatt Harvey’s work at his web site.

Prologue

Hers was the last face I would have expected to see again. Nevertheless, she stared me down, silently daring me to say anything, to offer any spoken sound. Big, blue eyes, the first thing about her to entice me so long ago, invited me closer, yet warned me away from her at the same time. I could not stay away, however, and I felt she knew that, perhaps better even than I knew it for myself.

I weathered the thunderstorm to meet with her. I assuaged the urge to stay inside, safe from the stinging, chilling rains. I faced the deafening thunder as it bellowed its fury at the night and I braved the journey beneath skies scorched with wicked lightning trails. As I did, the ominous, churning black clouds seemed in and of themselves to be mocking me. I did not falter. All this I did to see her one final time underneath the onslaught of the worst storm I had ever seen.

I would not ignore even the slightest invitation to come a bit closer.

The storm did not move her, nor did its buffeting winds seem to bother her. She stared defiantly through the storm, her childlike countenance telling a story all its own through the innocence painted there. She wanted to tell me the story, but the night had taken her voice, and left her as quiet as I myself had become. She did not even pull the rain-soaked strands of blonde hair from her visage. She looked past those as well. Big, blue eyes focused beyond it all, beyond the storm, beyond the street corner and its grays and shadow, and beyond me.

I wiped clear my eyes and drew closer, rain-blind and wind-blown. Nothing stayed my approach. I had to hear her one last time, hear what she called me there to tell me. Rumpled, drenched clothing topped by a sodden raincoat told me she had been out in the elements too long already. I needed to listen quickly and hear her well.

I smoothed the unruly hair back from her face when I drew near enough to touch her. She was cold and wet and still unemotional, unwilling to even acknowledge I had come. She ignored me with her blank stare and her angry eyes and her cold demeanor. I wished it could have been otherwise. I wished she was not so silent, so angry, so detached.

I wished she had not been dead.

When I took away my hand again, I saw in the half-light of the storm the thick, sticky blood clinging to my trembling fingers.

She lay on her back in a gutter not ten feet from the street drain. Her neck was mutilated, torn by what most would have thought to be an animal mauling. Most of her throat was gone. Much of the neck’s flesh around the spine was missing, too.

My stomach churned and my face flushed. I knew the feeling. My dinner wanted to rise from its grave in my stomach to join the graveless death before my eyes.

The young woman before me had a name, once upon a time. Before life had been stolen from her, before her breath had been ripped from her very throat, she had a name. Events as of yet unrevealed had delivered her to the land of the dead, however, and my knowing her name did little to offer her any consolation.

I whispered it anyway, perhaps a last farewell to a friend.

“Amanda…”

Thunder clapped and the pavement beneath us shook. The wind struck me and forced me to lose my balance where I crouched beside her lifeless form. I toppled onto her just as lightning flared again and turned the night into an oddly blue flare, only seconds come to life.

It was just long enough to let me see her eyes move.

I jerked upright, frightened beyond reason.

0 She was already in motion.

Fear clutched at my insides, twisting hard and fast to tie me up in knots. I reeled backward, but she had my overcoat in her grasp and held me near her. I smelled her then, the death on her, even as despair in the ragged voice suddenly gasped alive when I knew it could not be.

“It comes to this, it comes to you!” she screeched, a banshee in blood.

The voice cut me with icy talons and left me shivering. I jerked against her grip with panic but to no avail.

She continued with the dire message.

“You came to me to know the truth! It is hidden! You must find it, don’t let it find you!”

I tore away, gagging at the smell, unnerved by the empty, staring eyes and the voice gargling in blood. I fell back, looking skyward. It was then I noticed the rain falling. It had become blood.

The buildings around us, the pavement beneath us, the dim streetlights glowing upon us all at once were awash in the blood rain. A green street sign not far from me glittered in the red downpour. The name on it leapt at me. ‘White Chapel’.

“You must find it!”

She was howling again, though I was no longer afraid. I had seen enough, and it was time to elude her.

000 I grasped the Cross beneath my shirt.

I awoke in my bed, safe and secure beside my sleeping wife, my breathing torn and razed. Sweat bathed me in its salty sting, yet I felt chilly in the night air. Darkness blanketed the room, and gave my hearing even more authority in the lack of sight. I listened to my raspy breath and my pounding heart…and the rainstorm buffeting the night outside my bedroom.

I touched my Cross, then thanked the Savior for His Mercy and Grace and a timely intervention into the dream I was certain could have killed me. He kept me from harm, just as He always did when those dreams came at me.

I prayed He planned to keep me safe after the call came, too. Any second, I knew, the telephone would ring. Those dreams always preceded a telephone call I would not want to receive, information I would not want to know.

Secrets I did not want to share.

Tamara rolled over to look at me and spoke in grave concern.

“You okay? Something wrong?”

I figured I had awoken her. I shook my head and offered a faint, forced smile, then started to speak. I would have told her not to worry. I would have told her not to concern herself, to just go back to sleep.

Before I could, the telephone rang from its perch on the white oak night stand.

I froze, and so did Tamara. I felt the tension in the bedroom squeeze in upon both of us. The hair on the back of my neck raised in apprehension.

After a long, ominous moment, the ‘phone rang again.

Chills bit into me. Tamara touched my arm. Her hand was cold.

“You were-” she began.

“Dreaming,” I interrupted. “Yes.”

Her eyes, hauntingly beautiful in the night’s obscured light, spoke on the fears her words would not give life.

“I know,” I answered her silent plea.

I knew, but I did not relish the thought of what I had to do.

On the fourth ring I answered the telephone with a good idea of what to expect.

“Priest here.” My voice was barely audible, a whispered regret of that which I had not yet been told.

A pause answered me first, then a sigh. A man’s voice chased the uncertainty.

“Hey, Mick,” the man slurred through a few too many drinks. “Hey, man, this’s ol’ Creek. You ‘member, we dated the Kenan sisters at the same time ’bout four or five years back-”

“I remember you, Creek,” I interrupted sadly.

The man on the other end cleared his throat. It was clear, though I could not see him, he was attempting to gather his wits about himself. I knew Bartholemew Creek well enough to know that he was probably running a shaky hand through his hair and shifting from one foot to another.

“Yeah, figured you would,” he said. “You always were a pretty sharp guy. How ya been? Heard you got married and finally learned to relax a little…”

I squinted my eyes and sighed myself. I wanted the call to be over. I wanted to know if I was right. Had another dream come true? Had something reached me from another place and time as I slept? It would not be the first time.

I let the detective linger in his own silence as I strangled in mine.

“I woke you…I shouldn’ta woke you like this…” he stammered. “I ought’a let you go…”

“Tell me what you called to say,” I snapped, a little more harshly than I had planned. At least it was mercifully quick and to the point. “I haven’t heard from you, any of you, in over seven years. I know you didn’t just call me to wish me well on my new life. Spit it out, Creek. What’s got you drinking… and me dreaming again?”

And, there it was. I had told him. I was dreaming again. I knew something before he even told me. He had been counting on that, and I made that part easier on him. He knew my past, and he was looking to make it my future.

He soaked it in for the longest empty, quiet seconds of our entire history.

“You dreamed? Like before?”

I shook my head though he could not see it. I thought it had stopped.

“Mick?” he asked again. Suddenly, he seemed a lot more sober than he had been.

“You tell me,” I growled irritably. “Did you call about Amanda Kenan?”

He began to whisper unintelligibly and swear at himself for ever calling. He sounded genuinely frightened to even be on the telephone with me. He ranted for several seconds, and then whispered to me again.

“She’s dead, Mick…found night before last…but, you knew, didn’t you?”

“I knew,” I admitted. “Just now, just tonight. But, if I remember correctly, Creek, you don’t believe in such things.”

“I need your help,” he said.

The statement fell from his mouth as if unbidden, but instinctive. I felt the thickness of the silence afterward and wondered if he would have taken it back if he could, if he would have said it at all had the alcohol not been so fluid in his veins.

He sniffled, then cleared his throat again.

“Creek,” I said.

“I’m working a…a case down here,” he spat through strained intervals. “I can’t…get a break…get a lead…or a witness. Now, the latest…victim…”

Creek was crying, trying to hold it back.

“Amanda,” I finished for him. I whispered the name, as I had in the dream. Some part of me expected her to speak back to me now in that ragged voice with which she had ripped the silence in the dream. She did not, however. Only the young man I had known as Bartholemew Creek did.

“Amanda…my wife’s own sister…oh, man’o’ man…you just don’t know…” he muttered, his voice broken and dislodged from his throat. “The way Brittany looks at me now…the way she talks to me…”

“I’ll be there by noon tomorrow,” I said.

I could imagine him nodding emphatically.

“Yeah, yeah, you sure you can..?”

“Good-bye, Creek.”

I dropped the telephone back into its cradle without hearing his response. Part of me wanted to flee this circumstance. Part of me wanted to open its mystery and unlock the terrible truth. None of me wanted to spend any great deal of time talking to Bartholemew Creek, his wife, or her family. I would not have even wanted to speak to the dead Amanda, if she had not spoken to me first.

“What was it, Mikhael?” Tamara asked again, wanting to hear more.

No words came out of my mouth, but Tamara heard in the quiet whispers of my eyes and my expressions that the dreams had begun again. She was like that. The last of the great wives, I believed. She knew me inside and out, my public and my secret sides, my conscious and subconscious selves…and she loved me anyway.

“Mikhael,” she insisted. She laced long, elegant fingers over my bare arm and squeezed. Her lovely nails dug in with urgency. “You have to talk about it.”

“You should get back under the covers. Your hands are cold.”

I evaded her urging. I did not look at her eyes, either, but I knew their sea-green pools churned with a passionate concern. They always did. Soft, pink lips would purse in the newly forming pout she would display if I did not allow her inside, if I did not bring her into my dilemma and let her help.

When I dropped back into the pillows and covers of our bed, I stared at the darkness and saw images from the dream again. I covered my face with one hand.

“Tell me,” she said again.

I moved my hand and stared into the black.

“Amanda Kenan,” I said slowly, “as you may remember, was a friend in Wilmington.”

“One of your old flames, if I remember it right,” she inserted without missing a beat. “What happened?”

“No, she wasn’t,” I corrected. “We were never more than friends.”

“Oh, okay,” she shrugged. “Go on.”

“We weren’t,” I reiterated. “It was hardly anything even remotely romantic.”

She nodded again, her eyes swallowing me. Her only expression was one of concern for me, and for what news I may present. “Okay, I get it. Go on.”

I was suddenly aware how little that faded attempt at romance mattered now, to Tamara, to me, and, for that matter, to Amanda.

Tamara’s voice was lovely there in the dark, almost as beautiful as she was. I wondered what I had ever done to deserve her love, the love of a kind, considerate soul and a heart as big as the oceans.

“She’s dead, Tamara. And, not just dead.”

Her lovely features took on that haunted look. Light played over her pale face like moonlight spilling over a cool lake.

“She’s been murdered.”

Tamara squeezed her eyes shut and lowered her head a little.

I waited a moment, and then added an additional thought.

“I wouldn’t be so quick to declare it, but the ‘phone call was Bartholemew Creek.”

“That junior deputy friend of yours?” Tamara asked. “I remember him, I think.”

“That junior deputy is a Lieutenant in the Detectives Division of the Sheriff’s Department down there, now. They’ve been working a case, and he thinks the perp in it is responsible for Amanda’s death.” I paused, reminiscing. I came back to my thought a second later. “Oh, yeah, and they need my help.” I chuckled at the irony.

“After what they did when-” she blurted angrily.

“Now, Tamara,” I soothed.

She was very defensive of me, and took the imagined and real slights I suffered at the hands of the New Hanover county legal system more seriously than I ever would. It was one grudge she clutched very close to herself. I, personally, had almost forgotten the entire thing. Almost…until the dream.

“They are at the end of their collective wits. If there is really anything I can do, you know I have to try.”

“You have to,” she answered, a sad smile on her face, her eyes pooled with concern. Her gentle hands fastened onto my arm under our covers.

“I have to,” I confirmed.

She offered only a rebuttal of silence.

“Tamara?” I whispered in the dark.

She rolled closer to me and pressed against me.

“I know you do,” she allowed softly, “and that is one of the reasons I love you so much. But, you have to be careful.”

I cradled her head with my hand and pulled her into a long, soft kiss. I tasted the sweet of that kiss and closed my eyes, feeling a rush of heady emotions.

She stroked the side of my face with a soft hand and made me promise to be careful. I did, of course, and did my best to convince her all would be well. She did not need to have the extra worries of the dreams, the subtle details I often left out when relaying them to someone. She did not need to know that the night had told me in the dream that there would be danger in talking to the dead girl. There would be danger in helping. There would be danger in doing what I could.

Tamara felt cold in my arms and I squeezed her and wrapped her in covers and embraced her, stroked her, loved her.

Hours passed. She again slept. I drifted somewhere between awareness and slumber for the longest while, remembering Amanda in her laughs and jokes and smiles. Eventually, I lost consciousness and slipped into dreams again.

Amanda Kenan did not come with them to see me. Nevertheless, her voice still haunted me in remnant dreams. The stage was set, and the song being sung was one of challenge, and of reckoning. All that was left was to dance.

Knight’s Armor

Chapter One
There are one thousand. Some sniff the cool, afternoon air. Others writhe effortlessly in the sky. None of them are friendly. They wait near the pinnacle of Candor’s Shield, located in the mountains, for the Commander’s shriek announcing the advance.

Each member received a specific assignment. The target, Boomtown, 50 miles west of their present location. Boomtown is nicknamed for its production of the famous Philico brand boom box radios.

Among the throng, a little being hovers anxiously. She trained with the previous regiment and successfully drove her victim insane. A tall figure wriggles next to the little one. Looking down with its solid, black eyes, she threatens, “Don’t fail or you’ll pay dearly, understand Bulba?” said Sifter.

“I understand,” said Bulba, staring in return. She didn’t like being intimidated by the likes of Sifter, the second assistant. That was Bulba’s job, to frighten. She did not welcome Sifter’s disapproval or her intimidation tactics.

The vaporous figures twisted suddenly and came to attention. With eyes fixed on Commander Planter, they prepared to move out.

“Go!” echoed the long, eerie cry of the Commander. The massive horde of grey beings extended their necks, beckoning the updraft to snatch their large heads into the air current. Bulba joined the throng and collectively, they swarmed toward Boomtown. Their bodies looped and coiled. Rhythmically they pulsated, then glided, then pulsated. Body slots widened, consuming the air, thrusting them high above the rocky terrain.

Gliding over the twin rivers, Bulba glanced over at Sifter, whose gaze was fixed toward the east. The Commander’s first assistant, Lure, chose Bulba for this mission after her last victim ended up in Graceland Sanitarium under a suicide watch. Sifter would know Lure chose wisely after this assignment was over.

The city skyline came into view. To the human eye, the group looked like a dissipating cloud, hardly noticeable in close proximity to the waning sunset. The dwindling pack descended lower and deliberately.

After passing Lake Freedom, Bulba sniffed the air. The insecure strengthened her, and there were plenty of self-doubters in this town. But she must remain focused. She learned that her new target was younger than the one before. It wouldn’t take as long to weaken this one, at least that’s what Bulba believed. She turned right at the Philico factory and slowed down at a tiny row house. Number 1349. She slipped in unseen and unheard through the bedroom wall, straight through the floor, into the living room.

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