SAMPLE CHAPTER:
Chapter 1
Jake held her face between his fingertips as her features slid from one girl to the next. Deep eyes like rich mahogany blinked back at him as a thousand familiar images passed, one into the other. Each blank face showed no sign of interest in him as he held her until finally the nickelodeon of women remembered and forgotten stopped on a face whose eyes flared as they met his.
“You!” she cried. “I have finally found you.”
Before he could react she was on him, her lips sweet and warm against his.
When she pulled away the light breeze chilled the wetness around his mouth.
She turned and said, “There is no time, Jake. Just know that I have loved you through a million dreams and chased you across the infinite breadth of imagination.”
And then she was gone. Her tender, earnest, voice replaced by sudden darkness and the shrill blaring of a cellphone sounding from his nightstand.
His muscles were slow to react and his fingers numb from sleep but he managed to maneuver the phone to his ear and answer.
“Hello?”
“Jake.”
“What.”
“Jake, it’s Tess.”
“I know. Why are you-”
“Dad’s dead. I need you to come to the hospital right way.”
Two Weeks Later
The silence of the night was broken by the scrape of a match head on flint and the hiss of the flame which burned bright in the pitch. The heat crept down the wooden stalk of the match, licking the cool air, until his flesh seared and the smoldering embers drifted to the ground where they were crushed under foot.
“You forgot to light the candle.” Tess reminded him.
“You’re right. My mind was drifting. I’m sorry.” Jake replied.
He sparked another match and touching it to the wick between them which roared to life, casting a flickering glow against the walls of their back patio. The screened in walls lulled with a dull breeze which carried the scent of dead leaves on its heels.
“The power’s out.” Tess began though Jake interrupted.
“I know. That’s why I lit the candle.”
“She was scared,” Tess continued, “So I gave her a Klonopin.”
“That was the right thing to do.”
She fidgeted in the old wicker chair as Jake took a see next to her. That same morning they’d sat and watched the ducks float by, stragglers left behind when the bulk had migrated to warmer climates. Now, with the moon hidden behind clouds, and in the stillness of the storm’s wake, the lake was blanketed in night and they looked into nothingness.
“Can’t you leave tomorrow, Jake?”
He shook his head and leaned down to the candle, sparking a cigarette in its flame, “Its an eight hour drive. I want to hit the mountains by dawn, not dusk. Jeff said-”
“Can’t Jeff go for you? He knows the area better.”
Jake took a slow drag of his cigarette. As he exhaled the smoke formed a twirling mist between them.
“You know I have to do this. Its just for the summer.” he ansered.
“Is it?”
He cast her a stern look, “Yes.”
“I have to go back to school in August. I can’t stay behind to look after her…”
“And while you’re away at school I’ll be home with her. Every day. Until God knows when. The least you can do is give me this summer.”
He punctuated his words by driving the cigarette into the ashtray, which flared and sizzled in a damp pool of ash.
“I’ve got to leave now. Call me if anything happens. If the power is out for more than a day just go to uncle Bruce’s.” he said.
Keys jingled eagerly between his fingers.
“Give mom a kiss for me.” he added as an afterthought.
He could see tears threatening to fall in Tess’ eyes and knelt at her side, “Look. I hired the lawyer and told him to split everything with you. We’ll share mom’s expenses, fifty fifty. The one thing we can’t share is that house though. We just need to get rid of it.”
She coughed to hide a sob, but the tears rolling down her cheek could not be ignored. Unsure of what else to do, or if he’d said the wrong thing, he wrapped his arms around Tess and whispered an apology.
“Sometimes,” she answered, “I think dad was as crazy as mom.”
As planned Jake spent the bulk of the drive on the Interstate, his truck beating a familiar rhythm as something beneath the the passenger seat rattled with an endless metallic clang. Reflectors in the road illuminated as the light from his headlights strck them then faded to his right as he barreled down the left lane at a steady ten miles over the posted speed limit. He moved fast enough to get him far away from the sleeping suburb in upstate New York as quickly as he could but not so fast as to pique the interest of the Highway Patrol stationed at regular intervals along I-81 South.
After several hours of monotonous driving his mind began to drift and his eyes started to lose their focus. Jake kept his eyes peeled for the reflective signs which hailed the coming of a rest stop, and after a half dozen miles he found one which boasted not only junk food, but coffee.
The rest stop was so generic that it could have been anywhere on the East Coast were it not for the large vinyl letters spelling “Welcome to Pennsylvania” which hung above the unattended visitors information center. Easy to clean tile floors spanned from kiosk to kiosk which offered stale fast food in the pre-twilight hours. Jake followed his nose toward a kiosk with a single, bleary eyed, attendant brewing fresh pots of coffee for the early morning rush which would soon be upon him.
As he strode up to the counter, his mind still on the road, he nearly bumped into the only other traveler in the rest station. She was short and aging. From beneath a wide brimmed holly strewn white hat a set of dentures gleamed from behind a placid smile. A lacy eggshell church dress bulged around a middle that was far passed its prime and her ankles swelled inside her pale stockings. Her feet plunged in to glinting white pumps with shallow heels. A streak of lace coiled around her cane from curved top to rubber soled bottom.
She cast him a subtle wink and turned to order a small decaf latte. When the barista had poured the drink the woman left her change as a tip and moved on. Jake ordered his own, caffienated latte, and turned toward the exit with thoughts of a cigarette and hot drink in the open air which would clear his head.
The jingle of jewelry dangling from a white gloved hand caught his attention and when he turned to its source he saw the old woman in white beckoning him with a wide eyed grin. He could have simply kept walking, but they had made eye contact. Unable to think of a polite way to refuse he crossed the tiled floor and took a seat across from her.
Extending a bony gloved hand she beamed at him, “Elisa, sugar. You’re quite the little gentleman to keep me company.”
Jake accepted the hand with the tips of his fingers and shook a weak greeting.
“Jake. And its uh, no trouble. I’m pretty good at keeping company.”
Her liver spotted cheek rose in another soft wink, “Now, now. Nothing too salacious, I hope?”
It took a moment for the comment to sink in properly, but when Jake’s road weary mind caught up with the conversation he gave her a dry laugh.
“No, nothing like that. I just keep my mother company a lot. That’s all.” he answered.
Elisa shifted in her seat and raised her own cup to her lips, slurping loudly, “They never make these sweet enough. Would you be a doll and fetch me a few sugars?”
Jake stood dutifully, automatically, and asked, “How many?”
Elisa held up her gloved palm and wiggled five fingers, indicating as many sugars.
At the kiosk counter Jake asked for five sugar packets and the barista indicated a serve-yourself bin. As he retrieved the condiments the barista whispered softly, “Thanks.”
“Hm?”
“Thanks for taking the old lady off my hands. Comes here every night at four in the morning. No idea how she even gets here. Just walks up with her cane and chews my ear off.”
“Oh. No problem.”
“Whatever you do don’t get her started on her son.”
Regretting that he had even stopped at the rest station to begin with Jake nodded politely to the barista and head back to the table. Elisa gripped his wrist with cold, talon like, fingers when he returned and thanked him repeatedly before adding all five sugar packets to her eight ounce cup. Again she slurped heavily, leaving a thin trail of coffee hanging from the line of gray hairs dangling from her upper lip. When she lay the cup back on the table between them she raised the brim of her Sunday hat and for the first time Jake noticed the thick clumps of mascara painted beneath yellowing eyes. There was a distance in her pupils, set in that pale pool of yellow, that suggested she was looking through him. It was the same look his mother had given him when he laid her down in bed at sundown.
“Such a good boy, Jake. And you said you sit with your dear old mother? Why, if only you could talk to my boy. Maybe he’d smarten up and spend more time with me.”
Jake remembered that old saying: if you’re in for a penny, you may as well be in for a pound.
He replied, “You don’t see your son very often, then?”
Elisa pulled back casting a pitying look at Jake, her coffee swirling in the cup nearly leaping over the lid.
“Well of course not, sugar. He’s dead. Been dead thirty years.”
She spoke as if it were common knowledge and Jake gave her a polite nod.
“Sorry to hear that, miss.”
“I was too, trust me,” she replied, “But just because he’s dead doesn’t mean he shouldn’t visit.”
Jake cast a pleading look at the barista across the court who busied herself cleaning a spotless display case.
“His wife still visits me every week in the home.” Elisa continued.
“That’s awful nice of her.”
“Oh, it’s quite a treat. She’s the prettiest little thing, you know. Made her own wedding dress, too. I’ll never forget it. A floral pattern she found in the basement of an old fabric store. A shimmering coral. Well she worked for weeks and weeks and weeks on that old dress. Brett, my son, even bought her an anvil so she could pound the rivets in. It laced up in the back you see. Oh, when she walked into the church every jaw was on the floor. Prettiest bride since myself and I’m not ashamed to say it. She was buried in that dress. It was a shame they couldn’t have an open casket viewing, though. I would have liked to have seen her face one last time.”
This time Jake didn’t engage, he just sipped his latte and averted his eyes as he always did when his mother would say something similarly off color. When he’d laid her down to bed the previous evening she had touched his wrist and whispered that he should send father up and maybe go see a movie for a few hours with his sister.
The silence was short lived. Elisa slurped her cup dry and plunked it down on the Formica as if she were draining a shot glass. Clumps of sugar sprayed from the cup and Jake wiped them from his chin, looking down to see a quarter inch of soggy white sugar built up like silt in the cup.
“So where are you going, Jake?”
“Huh? Oh. I’m heading out into central PA. Kinda near Harrisburg.”
“Oh! Its lovely out there. My son Brett was married in the Appalachians. Cutest little chapel, right by this beautiful creek. There was this cemetery on a hill next to the Church. When he was a boy I used to let him play in it with his friends, but they had to be careful see. The tombstones were so old that some were like to fall down and crush your toes. But near everything out there is old. So you mind yourself while you’re doing whatever it is you’ll be doing out there young man.”
Jake smirked and gulped down his latte, placing the cardboard cup next to Elisa’s.
“Wouldn’t want to disturb no graves, right ma’am?”
Elisa folded her gloved hands gently on her swollen lap and pursed her lips in a doting smile.
“Exactly,” she answered, “Don’t let me hear about you disturbing graves down there.”
With nothing else to do Jason stretched and turned his head toward the exit.
“Well, thanks for sharing a drink with me ma’am but-”
“Oh I understand, Jake. Don’t let me keep you. Just mind yourself, ya’hear?”
“Will do, ma’am. Nice to meet you.”
Jake’s truck barreled down the Interstate at nearly ninety miles an hour, the embers from his cigarette streaming from a crack in the window. Every few seconds he’d peak in the driver’s side mirror to see the hatch was still shut on his gas tank. Jake didn’t often smoke in the truck due to the gas flap’s faulty lock. While the rag stuffed in the tank worked well enough to prevent gasoline from spilling out onto the highway, it was a death trap if a stray ember should strike it. But even fueled by espresso Jake was still rattled. With images of the woman in white in his head he put as much distance between himself and her as fast as he possibly could.
When dawn finally broke and the highway swelled with cars he eased the old truck into the flow of traffic and waited for his exit. At this hour he shared the road with local delivery trucks and massive sixteen wheelers on cross country runs. Like rest stops, the logos were the same wherever you went and with the sterile monotony of the Interstate he only knew he had left New York by the unfamiliar towns named on each sign. Clark Summit. Olyphant. Wilkes-Barre. Each unfamiliar town passed in bright white letters on dark green backgrounds suspended above the southern stretch of Interstate 81 South until, somewhere near a place called Fey’s Grove, he broke off onto the Eastern stretch of Interstate 80..
The brief reprieve from boredom offered by changing highways faded and was replaced once more by the drone of scenery passing by his windows. After an hour, though, Jake felt a slight pressure on his ears and sting in his sinuses. He was slowly rising in altitude. The truck’s tires strained against a long curve in the road. A towering rock face passed to his right and a wall of trees blurred by to his left. The highway shrank to two lanes, flanked only by a safety strip and single guardrail. And then for several terrifying seconds vertigo struck as he came into a break in the trees. Over his left shoulder he saw a plunging valley blanketed in treetops where a lake reflected the bottoms of the clouds in the sky. Small cottage homes were nestled up against the lake’s shores. Fifty feet below him the Eastern leg of the interstate coiled around the mountain and were it not for the rumbling of the security strip beneath his tires he would have plunged headlong into the idyllic scene.
He jerked the wheel to the right and centered the truck in his lane. Safe again, Jake turned his eyes forward and dared a glance at the sudden appearance of a colossus of rock and earth. Towering halfway to the clouds and bathed in the morning sun a soft, rounded, peak of the Appalachian range watched over him. In the crystal skies of morning he could see individual patches and groves in the mountain side and imagined sitting in them, looking back at the world from that vantage point. He smiled at the scene and the muscles in his mouth ached from the effort.
He passed the last hour of the journey taking in the splendor of the quiet pace of central Pennsylvania. Pulling off the interstate into a series of local roads, he found himself cruising for endless minutes beneath the lush canopy of low hanging branches through which beams of sun occasionally burst. Narrow roads with blind turns scaled up massive hills and opened headlong into deep valleys. Roots of trees strained against the walls of dirt to his left and right, and boulders remained where the road had been carved from the mountainside. The undulating paths occasionally gave way to long stretches of flat land where stalks of corn stretched to the horizon and the curve of the Appalachians loomed against blue skies.
He passed through a sleepy town nestled in a rocky valley. Three square miles of tightly packed homes with no basements huddled around a Victorian era church boasting Lutheran services seven days a week. Jake slowed as he passed a Gothic looking town hall at the bottom of a hill, framed by scaffolding around a crumbling corner. The road twisted and he found himself in the business center of town. Two suburban blocks with quaint stores and a single Pepsi machine with a logo from an era he could not remember. A video store with old VHS in the window was pushed up against a salon with sun bleached styles from the eighties plastered against the glass. Both windows were framed by lace curtains.
The old truck rumbled across a rusting suspension bridge over a trickle of a river and into a small block of single story wood homes with bowed front decks. The road curved passed a nervous looking home made of unpainted wood planks. He could see loose nails hanging from the planks on the side and some of the walls had swelled with the changing weather causing panes of glass in the windows to hang precariously in the frame. Beyond the nervous home was a massive lumber yard where he saw workmen loading a flatbed by crane. The lumber yard was next to a general building supply lot with stacks of bricks, cinder and a cement mixer boasting a daily rental fee. He took note of it all and crossed through a defunct rail station and into a serpentine stretch of road which climbed into the foothills of the Appalachians.
The directions he had brought had him follow the course of a winding brook, sometimes crossing through covered bridges which swayed beneath the weight of his truck. The road names took on a rustic Americana tone. Miller’s Gap. Fox Hollow. Finally he found himself a meandering stretch of road thick with trees. Nameless dirt roads wound back into the forest on either side as he slowed to a crawl. After long minutes with only the trees for scenery he slowed to a halt and killed the engine. The truck slowly rattled to a calm and he climbed down from the drivers seat.
Jakes legs ached from driving but after nearly nine hours he was eager to end the journey. He rounded the truck and grabbed his backpack from the passenger seat and slung it around his shoulder then turned toward a narrow break in the trees. He would have missed it were it not for the unmistakable kissing gate propped between two oaks.
He stood at the foot of the gate. It towered eleven feet tall and each side was drilled right into the trees, which had grown and changed with time, setting the gates off center so that they would never meet again. Rust flaked from the center bars and in some spots the original iron had completely corroded away, leaving jagged gaps like the snarled teeth of some great metal beast. He tried to lift one of the gates open, and the hinge popped loose of the tree leaving a splintered hole. With a slow creek the ironwork heaved forward and Jake stepped back. For a moment the structure had threatened to come down upon him. When the iron beams stopped wobbling, however, he crept between the two gates, unwilling to tempt fate by trying to move them again, and set upon the dry dirt path beyond.
No footprints preceded his in the dust. Nor were there any tire tracks, even without the iron-beast the entrance to the path was too narrow for most cars. But though there was no evidence of travelers before him the path was clean and clear, snaking back and up a hill to a crest he could not see over. The incline was slow and after a half mile he turned and looked back toward his truck which was now invisible behind the high branches of looming trees. The strap of his backpack dug into his shoulder and he climbed the hill with dry dust kicking up in his wake.
After a mile, as he approached the zenith, he turned again and could see the tops of the trees at the bottom of the hill. For a fleeting moment he worried about his truck but reminded himself that this wasn’t like back home. He was someplace different. Someplace safe.
As Jake reached the top of the hill he finally saw it properly. Part of him had not even expected it to be there, but there it was. The house, his father’s secret, stood dark and still waiting for Jake to come to discover it.
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Jake Wilkin’s father had kept the old house a secret from his family. But when he inherits the house from his father, Jake receiveS more than a property- he becomes the keeper of a dark family secret.
Dark Asylum Studios (Horror Music, Books) 