David E Anderson – Author

Prologue – The Trespasser

As Henry Sykes walked along the highway, the rain kept getting heavier and heavier.  When he’d left the diner – forced out when it closed for the night – it had been a light sprinkle, and he’d hoped that the walk to Logan would be a dry one.

But the continually increasing rain seemed to dampen his hopes the same way it dampened his clothes.  Without even a raincoat, a man his age could well end up badly ill.  His combined lack of insurance and mistrust of doctors would, he knew, leave him fighting it on his own.

Maybe a bad cough would help him get into a shelter.  The people there pitied the sick, and he no qualms feeding on their pities when it suited him.  He’d convinced the waitress at the diner to get him a sandwich and coffee, praising her generosity and continually reminding her that God loved her.  He told them about the long walk ahead of him to Logan, hoping they’d offer him a ride or arrange it with another customer, but she and the fry-cook lived locally and they never even asked other customers to help the poor old homeless man out.

Sykes had been living on the streets of Sandersville, a small town in southern Michigan, occasionally helping the locals any way he could in exchange for food, money or shelter, and occasionally helping himself to loose change or jewelry he figured they wouldn’t notice was missing.  But after pushing his luck just a little too far in that regards, he’d ended up in jail for a few nights.  In exchange for a promise to leave town, he’d been let out, and thought he’d try his luck on Logan, a much larger city.  Without even enough for bus fare, he decided to hoof it, hoping for clear weather on the walk.

No such luck.

He’d walked a mile when he saw a pair of headlights approaching from behind. He stopped and prayed that the car wouldn’t pass him by. His feet were already hurting, and the shivers were difficult to control.

When the headlights were finally close enough to make him visible to the driver, Henry frantically waved his hands over his head, and stepped out into the vehicle’s path.

The pickup truck swerved around him and kept going.

“Stop! Stop!” he screamed.

The pickup braked suddenly, stopping in the middle of the road. Henry ran up to it and opened the passenger door.

“Thank God you stopped!” he told the driver.

“What’s the problem?” asked the driver. Even though the door was open, no lights were on inside the cab, and Henry couldn’t see much more than the fact that the driver was slightly heavy.

“I’m heading to Logan, and I couldn’t stand walking in the rain another ten or twenty miles.”

“Okay,” said the driver, motioning for him to hop in.

Henry climbed in and shut the door, and the driver floored the accelerator, rocketing the pickup truck forward.

“Henry Sykes,” said Henry, offering his hand.

The driver shook it. “Pleased.”

“Not as pleased as I am.”

“So, what’s your story?”

“Got a job lined up in Logan, and just in time. No job, not car, no nothing. You headed for Logan?”

“Lavensburg, actually. But I can drop you on the outskirts of Logan.”

“That would be great.” Henry had expected the driver to level off on the speed once he reached the limit, but the pickup was still accelerating. He glanced at the speedometer. Seventy-five and climbing.

“You in a hurry?”

“Not really.”

Henry buckled himself in, but didn’t hear or feel the familiar click.  He lifted the buckle, and it came out of the catch.

“Your seatbelt’s not working,” said Henry.

“I know.  No one ever rides there, so no point in fixing it.”

“I guess,” said Henry. “Just don’t hit nothing, okay?”

The driver finally leveled off at ninety. If there was a curve ahead, or if a deer stepped out in front of them, the driver would never be able to see it in time.

“I think this is a little fast, don’t you?” said Henry.

“I think you’re a little liar, my friend,” replied the driver.

“Huh?”

“The job in Logan. There’s no job.”

“Sure there is. An old friend of mine…”

The driver pushed down on the accelerator, and the speed began climbing again. “There’s no job, is there?”

“No,” Henry confessed. “There’s no job.”

“How would you like to work for me?”

“What’s the pay?”

“There is none.”

Sykes paused, uneasy.  “Then why would I take the job?”

The man turned to him and smiled.  “Because you get to work for God Himself.”  He then turned back to the road.

“So you’re…what?  A religious group?  Doing God’s work?”

“No.  You don’t understand.  When I say you get to work for God Himself, I mean you get to work for God Himself.”

“So you work for God?”

The man shook his head.  “I am God.”

Before Henry could reply, the driver slammed on the brake. The pickup immediately began spinning, its tires squealing in protest. Henry was thrown forward and his head struck the windshield, and was then thrown sideways against his door. The car was still spinning, and when he opened his eyes, he could see nothing. He reached for the door handle, planning on fleeing from the pickup the moment it came to a stop. The driver grabbed Henry’s arm.

Sight, though doubled, leaked back into Henry’s eyes. As the car finally came to rest, Henry managed to spot the door handle, but had trouble grabbing onto it with his blurred vision. He did spot the glove compartment opening and the driver’s other hand reaching for something inside.

Henry managed to get the door open, but his attempt to bolt for the woods ended up being nothing more than his falling out of the truck onto the ground. He looked up and saw the driver stepping out of the door above him, and could now see a syringe in his hand.

He tried to get up, but could do no more than crawl on his hands and knees. He could hear the man walking behind him, amused at Henry’s pitiful attempt to flee. Finally realizing he had nowhere to go, Henry collapsed, and a moment later the syringe stabbed his right arm.

Chapter One

(June 17)

I

Frances Allen piloted her white station wagon up and down the hills, the radio a little louder than it should probably be. Since leaving Logan only twenty minutes earlier, it appeared everyone in the wagon except for her managed to fall asleep. The music helped to keep her mind off of her situation, something she hoped this little vacation would do.

Her husband, Richard, slept next to her. He was occasionally jarred awake by a quick turn or a bump in the road, but fell back asleep in a matter of seconds. Richard would have driven, but he’d had his license suspended on a D.U.I. charge two weeks before. He hadn’t been very drunk, but he had been careless. More careless than he had been in years, and it frightened Frances, even though his recklessness was one of the things that had attracted her to him in the first place.  She herself had always lived cautiously, and it was nice to be with a man who could break free and take her along with him.

Frances’ brother, George Hall, was an insurance agent in Logan, and Frances had been working for him as a part-time receptionist while she was going to college. It was the careless Richard Allen who had come to George seeking fire insurance for the pharmacy Richard was managing, since his insurance with another company had lapsed and there had been some minor fire damage to his store.

It was he same careless Richard Allen who made a pass at Frances that very day, asking her if she’d like to go to dinner with him. Though she knew nothing about Richard and had been seeing someone else at the time (though, to be fair, with no promise of exclusivity), she’d been charmed enough by Richard to agree.

It was the same careless Richard Allen who proposed to Frances (again unexpectedly) just over a month after they started dating, and only a day after she’d made the decision to break it off with her other boyfriend and date Richard exclusively. Though surprised by the sudden proposal, she found herself saying yes before even thinking it through. Somehow, he did that to her. She was never one to rush into anything. Before making decisions, she always weighed the pros and the cons, and always took into consideration what her family would think. After accepting his proposal, she realized her family would be dead-set against her agreeing to marry someone she hadn’t known very long and was a good five years older than she was. But she knew she was in love, and was excited at the prospect of spending her life with Richard Allen.  If they didn’t approve, then to hell with them.

The week after the proposal, Richard broke his nose in a bar fight. Frances hadn’t been with him at the time, and when she met him at the emergency room, he was drunker than she’d ever seen him. He frequently drank around her, but she’d never seen him quite so intoxicated. His speech slurring, he told her he wouldn’t get so drunk ever again.

And he hadn’t, until they’d been married a month. He’d gone out with co-workers to a club, and had come home quite plastered. Maybe not as bad as he’d been the night his nose was broken, but Frances was shocked by the fact that Richard had driven himself home in such a state. The next morning, he barely even remembered the drive.

She began to wonder if maybe her parents had been right about him.

But still she loved him and was determined to see their marriage through.

Then she found out she was pregnant. Another surprise, since they had been using birth control. She couldn’t exactly blame this on his carelessness, since the pills were her burden, not his.

Richard changed when she told him the news. He promised her he would stop drinking altogether. He also quit smoking, and he started taking his business a little more seriously.  He began an advertising campaign that was a huge success for the pharmacy, doubling his profits before Linda Hall Allen arrived in the world.

Linda was in the back seat, slumped against the window. She was now six years old, and bore a striking resemblance to her mother. They had the same blonde hair, though Linda’s was much longer, going all the way down her back. The basic features of their faces were similar, having a square-shaped head, a short, pudgy nose, and a small chin. Linda’s eyes, however, were definitely Daddy’s. Dark brown, almost black, such a contrast to her pale face and yellow hair.

Seated behind Frances was her brother George, a recent widower. His wife, Cynthia, died in a car accident less than three weeks earlier. At Cindy’s funeral, Richard asked George if he would like to spend the summer with them. He had been slightly careless in doing so, not having discussed the idea with his wife before asking, but Frances had thought it was a great idea. She was slightly angry at him for asking George without getting her input first. She let him know she liked the idea, but still wanted to let him know to get her okay in the future. With other unresolved issues thrown into the mix, their discussion turned into an argument, and Richard stormed out of the house. Later that night, he’d been pulled over for driving while intoxicated.

Ever since, things had been tense between Richard and Frances. He’d broken his promise not to drink. He was getting careless again. She loved him immensely, but wasn’t sure she could take him backsliding like this. Things had been looking so good, with the pharmacy’s profits being up again, and Richard having acquired a beautiful cabin on Lake Swanson for way less than it was worth.

Lake Swanson was named for William Swanson, who’d built homes along the lake in the late nineteenth century, according to his great grandson, James Howard. James was a realtor, the family trade apparently. He’d told Richard the cabin had been appraised at ninety thousand dollars, but that he would sell it to Richard for thirty thousand. Richard told Frances that James had never explained why he was letting it go so cheaply, but, somehow, Frances suspected that Richard wasn’t telling her everything he knew.

II

George Hall stared out the window of the car as it sped towards Lake Swanson, not really seeing anything except for the visions in his head. He was tired. Since Cindy’s death, he was always tired. He didn’t sleep much anymore. Not that he was having nightmares. In fact, he’d had only one that he could remember. If anything, his dreams were too pleasant. She was always alive in his dreams, always smiling and laughing. That was the problem. His dreams were so real, so real that he could almost come to believe that they were the truth and Cindy’s death was the illusion. And then, when he woke up, it was like losing her all over again.

Though they didn’t need George to identify the body, he asked to see her. He knew he would need to be convinced she was dead if he was ever going to truly believe it. They’d cleaned her up some, but the gashes in her head and the cave in her forehead where her skull had broken in were quite visible. Her eyes were open, and he’d swear he could see the terror of the final moments of her lives somehow burned into them.

When George was growing up, he’d collected all sorts of scary stories. Stories about vengeful spirits, psychopaths stalking young couples, graveyards where the dead weren’t quite dead. Even as an adult, it had been a hobby of his to research these stories, and he had quite a collection of the old E.C. horror comic books. As frightening as those stories were, they were nothing compared to looking down on the dead body of the woman he loved most in the world, the woman he’d planned on spending the rest of his life with. The thought of a person coming back from the dead, he realized, was not as terrifying as the reality that she wouldn’t.

His only real nightmare had been the night of her funeral – the same night that in another part of the city, his brother in law had been arrested for driving while intoxicated. The nightmare had been similar to a horror story of his.

In the nightmare, George rolled over in bed and woke up to find the sheets cold and wet on Cindy’s side of the bed. He’d gotten up and flipped on the light, and saw that her side of the bed was drenched in blood. George quickly got out of bed and backed against the wall, trying to scream, though nothing would come out. He turned his head, trying to will the horrible sight to go away, but then spotted a trail of blood going from the bed to the hallway, with bloody footprints.

In dreams and in horror stories, one does not always act rationally. One’s terror rarely overcomes their desire to find out what is going on. George followed the trail of blood out of the bedroom, down the hallway, and into the kitchen.

Cindy sat at the table, calmly drinking a cup of coffee as if nothing was wrong. Blood was draining from her facial wounds, puddling under the chair. She saw George, and raised her coffee cup. “Cheers, George, to death.”

He woke up there. In the actual story, the one he’d told Frances when he was seventeen and she was nine, the lady at the table had a knife in her skull (the husband had put it there earlier in the evening before burying her in the flower garden), and the dirt from the garden was mingled with the blood. Also in the story, she slowly removed the knife (George had come up with a sucking sound to accompany this part of the story), and stabbed her husband in the heart with it.