Kindle Edition
Amazon
William S Chadwick
Category:
Horror
Publisher: createspace
ISBN-10: 1518628435
Type: Fiction
Pages: 120
ISBN-13: 9781518628436
Price: $2.99 (eBook)
Albert comes home to find out his childhood home has secrets...dark secrets.
Albert Lane is indeed coming home, but he is about to discover that home isn’t what it used to be. In fact…it never was.
Grieving over the loss of the grandparents who raised him after his parents were killed in a tragic accident, Albert is coming home to the old farmhouse he grew up in. But that old farmhouse holds more than just his childhood memories. The family farm has secrets…and secrets (as his new wife, Jessie, can tell you) are bad, Mr. Lane…very bad. Secrets wrapped inside a secret? Oh, my!
Coming back to the old farm has awakened childhood memories of an imaginary friend (a little blonde-haired girl named Hannah) as well as the nightmares that drag him kicking and screaming back to the night his parents were killed…a night that ended with him trapped in an overturned car with a dead father and a dying mother.
Albert’s odd behavior has Jessie wondering about the secrets he is keeping from her…secrets that are quietly digging into her own graveyard of secrets…her own secret garden, where the prettiest flowers hide the ugliest secrets.
Will they survive the homecoming…or will the old farm claim them as well, burying them deep with all the other secrets?
Excerpt
About a half-hour after Albert took the wheel, they pulled onto the old gravel road that led to his grandparent’s driveway. Albert pulled the car over to put the top up. The gravel road would be extra dusty this time of year. He cringed at the thought of all that road dust getting into the upholstery of the Chevelle.
They seldom drove the old car unless they were just taking a short Sunday drive, but this trip was different. They weren’t just heading out for a few hours of enjoying the summer weather. They were moving. He could have had the car hauled down there with the rest of their belongings, but something about this trip had given him a hunger for a little nostalgia. He knew Arkansas would never really be the same for him again, but there was just something about taking the ’67 for his last trip home that seemed to help calm his nerves and settle the tightness in his stomach.
After the top was secured, he climbed back behind the wheel and eased the car back onto the gravel road. He kept the speed under fifteen on the rough gravel road, watching the scenery change as they crept along. He had put a lot of extra weekend hours into earning money to restore the old car, and a lot of weekend hours after that doing most of the restoration, himself. He wasn’t about to shake her to pieces now. He would get there soon enough. Truth be told, he would get there sooner than he wanted.
The sun was getting low on the horizon, and he flipped the visor down. In the summer, you didn’t need it on the narrow road. The overhanging trees provided a thick canopy that kept the sun out of your eyes. Once the leaves started falling, however, you were facing the sun as you headed out in the morning and right back into it in the evening, heading home. It was still a bit early for the leaves to be as thin as they were, but that happens sometimes when the summer dries out at the end. Sometimes the world doesn’t wait for old man winter. Sometimes things just happen too soon.
He hitched a breath as he thought about his grandparents again. The world could have waited a little longer with them. As far as he was concerned, losing them would have always been too soon.
They pulled up to the long, narrow drive that led to the old house he grew up in. He stopped for a moment at the mouth of the drive. He thought he would be ready by now, with the long drive down from Chicago, but now he wasn’t so sure. His palms were sweating against the steering wheel, and his fingers seemed to be unable to make up their minds. One second, they were locked tight around the wheel; the next, they seemed to have no grip left in them at all.
He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to convince himself it was still the same old place…still Granny and Grandpa’s house. It was still home. Something deep inside him, way down there where the heart can’t hear you anymore, told him that wasn’t right. It might be the place where he grew up, alright…but without Granny and Grandpa Lane, it was just another pile of sticks nailed together to keep the weather out.
…just another soulless corpse waiting to be buried and forgotten.
He felt himself tip just a little as Jessie’s hand slipped over his. The warmth of her touch brought him carefully back from the edge. It was a dark place he had nearly fallen into.
…dark…
…and cold.
“Feel my heart, Albert,” he heard her whisper, as she gently pulled his hand from the wheel and placed it against her chest. He wasn’t sure why she did that, or why it always seemed to work. It was just something she had always done when she saw him withdrawing…saw him hurting. There was something about it (a familiarity) that he could never quite grab hold of, but it always brought him back from that cold darkness that seemed so determined (so desperate) to pull him under.
It was the one thing that had bound the two of them together, this familiarity he felt with her. It came the moment he first laid eyes on her in that coffee shop just down from the dormitories. They were two students that should never have met, had it not been for Cool Beans. She was an art student, and he was a business major. From all outward appearances, the only thing they had in common was a love for good coffee that even a college student could afford. Cool Beans was the place.
He could still see her sitting there in her dark green turtle-neck with her steaming cup and a bagel, reading the magazine spread out on the table in front of her. Cindy Taylor (her best friend in college) sat next to her spouting loudly and obnoxiously about everything that had happened at the game the night before. Cindy, he had met before. He didn’t really care for Cindy. She had a big mouth, and no manners. The redhead sitting next to her, however, was another matter. If nothing else, she intrigued him by the ability she had to remain calm in the verbal onslaught of the last night’s tabloid featurette.
Well…that…and she was really cute.
He had watched her for about half the “gossip hour” until he stirred up enough courage to go over and introduce himself. If it wasn’t love at first sight, she certainly had him the first time he heard her laugh. It was intoxicating, that laugh of hers. It was familiar. That was the first time he had noticed the familiarity between them, and it spooked him more than just a little. It also drew him to her in ways that he had never imagined before, and still could not understand. He had never really understood the term “soul-mates” before then, but he certainly understood it that day. It was as if she had been made from his very own rib.
He slowly opened his eyes as she held his hand to her heart. His left hand relaxed its grip on the steering wheel, and came up to wipe the tears that had escaped. She whispered once again.
“Feel my heart, Albert.”
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