Science Fiction, mystery, fantasy
Date Published: February 6, 2018
Publisher: Chattercreek
The mystery that unfolds on a dark, eerie back road in upstate New York sends Nick Dowling on a frantic quest to understand his past. What he discovers about himself slowly drives him toward madness. Where does the truth unfold, in mystery or in the dream? Is truth the illusion he can't embrace? Just who is Nick Dowling?
Read a teaser
Guest Vera Jane Cook talks about her writing process
It
was a beautiful night in early August; the sky was an ebony sheet that
stretched across the horizon in somber silence. The moon was so full it
appeared fat―as if it had swallowed every star in heaven and glowed purely from
the pleasure of consumption. Nick Dowling gazed up at the sky through the
windshield of his new Jeep Cherokee. His wife, Jenna, had just sent him out for
a quart of milk. He was pleased to go, happy to be driving out under the stars
on the back roads of New Kingston. Except on this particular night, there were
no stars―just the moon, contently serene as it trailed his car like a wayward
balloon.
Nick
tapped his hands on the steering wheel and started singing along with the
radio. "Goodbye Miss American Pie" he sang out. The old
nostalgic lyrics filled the evening stillness, mingling with the crickets'
song, and the hooting of the owls.
Nick
was pleased: clear reception was not always a reliable luxury in the Catskill
Mountains of Upstate New York. The road ahead was empty. His beams were high
and his speed, slow. The last thing he needed was a startled deer to show up in
his headlights. The time off was exhilarating: there were so many things he
could get to, like fixing the lawn mower and painting the shed. This was the first
of several long weekends he and Jenna were able to steal since they bought
their second home in the mountains. He often had to work weekends to get his
job done, a job he found boring and unsatisfying, not like doing something
creative, but an executive's salary was nothing to scoff at. At least his
saved-up vacation days provided a perfect opportunity to hit the highway,
leaving Manhattan's sweltering concrete behind.
The
music changed abruptly, the scratchy sound it made reminded him of an old phonograph
needle skipping over a record. Billy Joel's "She's Got A Way About
Her" came through the speakers with only a slight static sound, like
cackle. This was the first song
Nick
heard after waking up in a beat-up hotel room so many years ago, dead broke.
All he owned back then was a pair of jeans and a rusty Gillette.
"I
don't know what it is," he sang out, just as his headlights illuminated a
barely visible road on his left―almost entirely hidden by trees.
"Looks
familiar," he said aloud, smiling, as if someone sat beside him who might
have agreed.
"I
know that road," he whispered. He hunched over the steering wheel and
slowed down for a better look. The road was mysteriously beautiful,
framed as it was by pine trees that swayed ever so gently in the summer evening
air. The impulse hit him like a spray of cold water, and he braked.
"Oh,
what the hell," he said as he backed the jeep up. This impulsive action
was very unusual for Nick who usually thought things through a thousand times
before he did them. But on this particular evening, he barely gave it a thought
before he took a sharp left onto the road. Perhaps there was something about
the moon that night, close enough to touch, a flirtation he could not refuse.
"Have
I lost my mind?" He laughed, looking around, seeing not much of anything
that warranted fascination.
The
road was narrow and dark, but he had just enough light from the moonlit sky to
read the barely visible road sign: Fox Hollow.
Nick
switched off the radio; he'd lost the clear station right after he made the
turn, and the static was irritating. Slowly, he drove up the bumpy road. The
night seemed wrapped in mesh, opaque and colorless. He accelerated his speed
just a bit, attempting to see beyond his headlights, but there was nothing before
him but the adumbration of trees: it seemed like hundreds of them were standing
tall against the sky, bending and tipping their branches into the quiet swirl
of the evening wind like visions between this world and the next.
The
moon hovered at the end of his sightline like a big mysterious white ball,
descending into the Earth, as if being swallowed. But the edges of the night
were dull. Everything around him looked like a poorly developed print. Nick
rubbed his eyes and watched as night's illusionary mist played havoc with his
imagination and shadow monsters came out of the darkness, as tall as giants.
Something
flashed through Nick's mind with a fervent intensity. Was there magic on this
road? Suddenly, he had a childhood memory. It came out of nowhere: a boy
fearing dragons in the night and dreaming of mythical sword fights in mystic
forests with a moon as elusive as this one. Was he that boy? His memories of
childhood didn't exist; his early life was a void. Yet there it was: a vision
of sword fighting with a friend so small and light― Sir Lancelot in dungarees
with his mother's pot for a shield.
Nick
felt a sudden chill. Leaning in to switch off the air conditioning, a flash of
light appeared on his hand, swiftly expanding, trapping his body in its glow, a
blaze of cold and paralyzing illumination. His body froze. He held his breath.
In moments, the light was everywhere, consuming the darkness as if from a
hundred headlights.
"What
the hell is going on?" Nick came out of his stupor and looked around
frantically. It was getting increasingly colder, as cold as the dead of winter
in Upstate New York can get. He started to shiver. But the night air had been
warm. What the hell was happening? He could feel his heart pounding; it felt as
if he were sitting inside a freezer.
His
bones began to rattle as he looked through one eye. The light was still there,
ubiquitous, the brightness: blinding. Fear settled on his chest as if he were
in the line of unexpected gunfire. He closed his eyes again.
"I
am victim to my own vivid imagination," he said, staring once again into
the opaque night.
The
lights suddenly disappeared, as if they'd been chewed and discarded by the
darkness.
"Kids
with flashlights, must be...what else?" But the cold? Strange weather condition?
Well, maybe...in the mountains.
Nick
sat quietly, even patiently, until his fear passed, until it flowed out of his
body, until his heart beat normally once again. When he felt calm enough, he
stared back into the shadows and surveyed the space around him. He realized he
had bitten his lip: he tasted blood.
He
lowered his window halfway to make sure the lights were really gone. He was
relieved to see everything appeared normal in the evening's shadow. The air was
warm on his skin. Once again, the moon bounced naturally in the sky, throwing a
path of light before him, like a megalithic corridor inviting entry.
He
accelerated slowly. The moonlight faded back behind the trees, and the night
became as dark as black ink. He nervously listened to the rocks and branches
crunching beneath the wheels of his jeep wondering if he'd lost the road and
was driving further into the woods.
Nick
couldn't see anything but his headlights. But then, sudden as lightning's
flash, as if he'd willed it, the night was lit by the welcomed sudden
reappearance of the moon.
"Where
you been hiding?"
Needing a sense of direction, he stopped the jeep. The
moon was fuller than he had ever seen it, but there were no stars out to guide
him, just some shadowy image in the sky.
What
the hell am I doing in the middle of nowhere playing tag with the goddamn moon?
There
was a threatening hush, a silence too barren to trust. The owls had ceased to hoot,
and the crickets were far too silent.
Without
warning, the stillness shattered into a million pieces by a sound that shook
his body from inside out. "Shit!" Nick cried, feeling his heart
pounding against his chest. "What the hell was that?"
Like
a drill in concrete, the sound was deafening. It was so intensely shrill it
might have been heard on the other side of the globe. But then the intense
sound vanished, disappeared as contiguously as a passing thought, back into the
night. Had
he imagined it? Nick
brought his hands up to his face. They were still shaking badly. No, this was not
imagination.
The suddenness of that awful sound jostled him so badly his heart beats were on
overtime, and his favorite t-shirt was soaked in sweat.
He'd
been on this road before. He'd seen the road in his nightmares. He dreamed he
was here.
Right
after Nick and his wife, Jenna, closed on their weekend getaway in New
Kingston, their retreat from Manhattan's urgent and colossal perplexities,
Nick's nightmares accelerated. It was absurd to have them―monster nightmares
belonged to children, not to men in their late forties. "I feel foolish to
have so many of my dreams invaded by macabre caricatures," he told Jenna.
"An odd thing for a grown man to have―nightmares," he'd said
reluctantly.
"Not
altogether unusual," Jenna responded as she listened to his tentative
explanations. "Maybe something is triggering some old and unresolved
issues you have with your mother...or father."
Nick
scowled at that, wondering how he'd ever get out of seeing a shrink. It was
absurd to think he needed one. Jenna insisted on blaming everything on his
parents. But how could he blame anyone he didn't remember?
He
accelerated over the stones and the broken branches of trees, hoping all the
crap on the road wasn't scratching the paint off the jeep's body, or putting
any frigging dents on his car. He felt too uneasy to slow down and check out
the damage. Wanting to feel sane once more had become a prerogative. This
introduction to Fox Hollow Road antagonized his sense of reality and left him
surprisingly disentangled from his perspective on who the hell he was or
believed himself to be.
He
looked up toward the sky. He felt as if he'd just driven in a circle; the
shadowy cloud was still above him and it appeared to cover the entire sky.
He
drove forward, afraid that if he didn't he'd wind up in a ditch―lost forever in
the goddamn woods. His heart was still getting a workout and his mouth felt
like an old hot towel. He wanted nothing more at that moment than to reach
civilization and grab a shot of whiskey.
"I've
had enough of this nerve-wracking adventure," he said, his eyes riveted
ahead.
My writing process begins as an idea in my head. Anything
could have instigated it, an article I read, an experience I had on the bus
that morning or a memory from long ago. I think about that idea until it begins
to take shape, until it begins to knock on my brain to be let out. So, I sit
down at my computer and I begin to write, to release my character. The next
thing I ask myself while my character is experiencing a fictional world where
anything is likely to happen, I ask what will happen while this character is
given soul and thought and weaknesses? Will someone be murdered? Who exactly
will be betrayed and why? What is it I’m trying to say? I don’t have any of
those answers when I first start out. I’m writing from a love of the English
language. I’m searching for words to include in my descriptions and it is
finding those words that inspire me and shape my characters as I add more and
more of them to my story. But just what is my story? What happens to these
people? Well, I don’t outline anything, not even when the story is complex,
like my novel Annabel Horton, Lost Witch of Salem. I give the characters free
reign and they begin to lead me forward, to tell me where they want to go. This
fictional world and I become one. I find myself falling into the unknown of their
world. I think about them all the time. I move the plot forward in my head
while I’m having coffee, while I’m taking a walk, while I’m caught daydreaming.
Things happen in my head and then I go back to string the words together, but
not just any words. I’m always looking for words that flow and have rhythm.
Yes, I hit roadblocks, so it takes more thought, more diving into a fictional realm
and allowing myself to solve puzzles, to create dilemmas, to show my humanity and
to reveal my character’s warts, to reveal their vulnerability. I might have a
book a year later. I write three books at once sometimes. Writing for me is a
compulsion. I must do it. I’m not even sure why. It is what compels me to read,
to write is the same. I pray the story works out, makes sense, makes people
laugh and cry. I write on, despite opinion, despite sales. I write to be read,
and I write because I am in love with the mysterious world of creation.
About the Author
Olivia Hardy Ray is the pen name for Vera Jane Cook, who is the author of Dancing Backward in Paradise, 2007 winner of the Indie Excellence Award for notable new fiction and an Eric Hoffer Award for publishing excellence, also in 2007. Dancing Backward in Paradise received a 5 Star Review from ForeWord Clarion. The Story of Sassy Sweetwater was a finalist for the ForeWord Clarion Book of the Year Award and the recipient of a five star review from ForeWord Clarion. Where the Wildflowers Grow was her third southern fiction novel and is receiving 5 star reviews from Amazon.com. Her latest southern fiction novel just released is Pleasant Day. Her woman’s fiction novel is Lies a River Deep and the soon to be released ‘Kismet’. Under her pen name she is also the author of Annabel Horton, Lost Witch of Salem, and Pharaoh's Star. The sequel to Annabel Horton, Lost Witch of Salem is Annabel Horton and the Black Witch of Pau. That novel will be released this summer. Jane, as she is called by friends and family, writes in the genres she loves: southern fiction, women's fiction, mystery and fantasy paranormal fiction. She lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with her spouse, her Basenji/Chihuahua mix, Roxie, her Dachshund, Karly, her Chihuahua, Peanut, and her two pussycats, Sassy and Sweetie Pie.
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