When she is a little girl, Elizabeth Keene accompanies her archeologist father to Brazil where she finds a gold medallion. It is tantalizing to her, and strange as well. She believes that it is emitting a force that draws her to it.
Years later, after she is grown and a well-known archeologist in her own right, she has nightmares about a strange creature that wants a key she is supposed to possess. The nightmares turn into reality in her Connecticut apartment when the terrifying creature appears. On her way to Kentucky where she has bought a farm, the creature continues to harrass her. In the days and months that follows, she joins her sister and several other people to solve the mystery of the strange being that she has come to call "Grim" and it is a fitting name. The creature is dressed in black and has very sharp fangs.
The young woman lay in her bed. Around her, the darkness was as much a friend as the daylight was an enemy of any night creature, except that even the darkness could not hide her from what dwelled in the deepest shadows. Alone in her Waterbury apartment, determined she would not sleep, she thought of all the ways she could stay awake knowing that sooner or later, sleep would come. She dared not sleep because she knew the nightmare would come again as it frequently did. The creature would come as it had since the day she’d been with her father in Brazil when they’d discovered the strange artifacts the professor called the Circle of Stones. She was only eleven when she went on that dig with her father and about thirty other people who were mostly students from various universities. She had only been afraid of the dark back then. Now she was terrified of it. Faint moonbeams invaded her room through the blinds casting ominous shadows on the walls. The wind howled outside sending a cold, tingling sensation down her back. Pulling a woolen blanket around her, she pushed herself up on her pillow and tried to stay awake despite the fact the green digits on the clock radio warned her it was after four in the morning.
She couldn’t go to sleep. He would come when she was asleep and when she was defenseless. The routine seemed to always be the same. Fighting sleep, dreading the drowsiness, the fatigue and finally succumbing to it, she would suddenly be in a dark forest walking along a dirt road with grass and weeds in the middle of it. The old wagon road was nothing more than two ruts with weeds growing in the middle of it. Sometimes, it would be weeks or months before she experienced one of the disturbing, terrifying nightmares. When she least expected it, when she thought she might never have one again, it always happened. She was always in a forest with a full, blue moon hanging high overhead.
The eerie light of the pale moon cast dancing shadows of leaves and branches upon the ground around her. As she cautiously made her way down a long road, she could sense that she wasn’t alone, that she wasn’t dreaming and that she was in danger. The nightmare was so real and the whispers coming from the forest around her terrified her. Elizabeth Keene felt as if the forest was alive and it would reach out and gobble her up at any moment. The whispers were always there, voices in the night that seemed to be trying to tell her something she couldn’t understand. Were the moaning, groaning sounds really voices or some animal that was in pain, or maybe limbs rubbing against each other? She could never concentrate on the sounds long enough to find out because she was always watching for him to appear. It was him, the specter, the ripper who terrified her the most.
As she walked on—although it felt as if she was really floating above the fog-covered road—with an alertness she’d never experienced in real life, she noticed, as she always did, the trees on both sides closing in on her until only the road remained in front of her. Elizabeth felt as if she were in a dark well that was slowly collapsing on her. Gazing through the mist, she could see the black door in the distance. The trees had closed in on it until the door was the only way out of the forest without turning around and going back to where she had come from. Where had she come from? She didn’t know and wasn’t compelled in the least to turn around and find out. The door was her only objective and she never questioned why she was so determined to open the door. Was the door an escape route into her bedroom where she could sleep undisturbed, or was it a pathway into something more horrible than the dream? Were the answers to her perplexing questions beyond that door or was something more hideous than she could ever imagine waiting for her.
She wasn’t dreaming. What she was experiencing was real. The trees were real and so was everything else. She kept telling herself to keep walking, to reach the door, to walk through it until she was safe on the other side. She’d be safe on the other side where HE couldn’t follow her. Was he waiting for her beyond the door? She didn’t know because she’d never opened the door.
Alone in a ghostly fog that clung to the ground like snow on a cold winter day, she grimaced, licked her mouth hoping to feel something to indicate she wasn’t dreaming, but feeling her moist tongue on her soft, cold lips only served to enhance her suspicion that everything was real. Elizabeth knew she had rarely felt anything in her dreams when she touched something like a tree, now she’d felt her tongue touch her lips and knew she was experiencing reality. At least, she thought it was real. Moving along as cold, stiff hands reached out for her from the trees, long bony fingers tugged at her clothes and two pulsating, red eyes stared at her from the bushes, Elizabeth knew she was going to reach the door and find out what was behind it before she went insane. Bathed in the milky glow of the full moon, she hurried along as best as she could attempting to ignore the hands, skeletal faces, creepy fingers and the red eyes because she knew they weren’t what she had to worry about. Someone else presented more danger to her than a few lurkers in the bushes.
Excerpt
Elizabeth removed the journals and research papers from the last trunk. A feeling of serenity came over her as she held the items in her hands. She dropped them on the floor when she spotted the golden medallion. It was in a plastic bag that had been labeled and had other information on it about where, when and how it was found.
Elizabeth hadn’t seen the mysterious relic for a long time. She abhorred it for some strange reason, didn’t want to be around it and yet, it held an attraction for her. The thing seemed to beckon, to draw her toward it as if it was trying to take possession of some part of her. Reluctantly taking the plastic bag in her hands, she sat and gazed at it for a few moments. It was ancient, luring and evil. She could feel it and somehow, she knew there was more to the medallion than just a clump of shiny gold and silver with strange, mysterious markings on it.
How could such a thing, a medallion, be the center of so much terror, she wondered. Turning it over, examining it, she could see nothing spectacular about it except for its beauty. How many hands had touched that medallion, she wondered. Maybe hundreds, she supposed.
What was it her father had once said about the medallion? The key! When she was still very young, he’d told her it was the key to the mystery. Even though she had studied everything that she could about the stones and the medallion, the only connection she could make between the medallion and the stones was that they resembled each other. Someone had constructed the stones to represent something they had seen and then made the medallion to look like the stones.
As she held the medallion in her hands, cold shivers ran down her spine, and she felt that she wasn’t alone. Awestruck by it, she walked to the bed and sat down staring at the curious object. Without hesitation, her mind raced back to that day in the Brazilian jungle when it had happened. Random images of the hot, steamy jungle, the blazing hot sun, the perspiring workers and her father sleeping in his hammock in his tent. It was noon, a time when most of the workers took an hour away from their grueling toil to relax during the hottest part of the day. Voices she hadn’t heard in years pounded her eardrums, memories that had been distant or nonexistent now paraded before her eyes like haunting ghosts from her past. Feeling as if she were being pulled into another reality, she resisted the tugging, nagging feeling. Her resistance was futile as the memories flooded her mind. She was lost to the present world and completely immersed in a place in time that had occupied one single day so long ago. Clutching the medallion, she let her mind drift back to that day unaware of the room or the world around her. Only images of that day in Brazil beckoned to her.
As if her eyes were seeing the world on that hot, humid day in 1988 through the eyes of an eagle sailing high above the Brazilian jungle, she let herself relax and soak in the comforting memories of her father, all the people she’d known then, and the discovery they’d made on that beastly day.
With the assistance of dozens of native helpers, the support of twenty-four students from the University of Kentucky and two other archeologists, Professor Keene and his young daughter Elizabeth had mounted an extensive onslaught on the tough terrain of the Brazilian jungle. Hoping to uncover evidence of the Incas living in the area, they’d spared little expense in their arduous endeavor. Young and full of energy, she’d been reluctant to nap when so much was going on as her father and some of the other native workers had grown accustomed to doing during the hottest part of the day. While sitting in the shade of her tent writing in her daily journal, she’d plainly heard Tommy Burgess yelling loudly for the professor when he made the first discovery at the dig.
Elizabeth smiled as she recalled the long trench Tommy and his crew had dug in the jungle floor. Stretching more than three hundred feet, sixty feet wide and eight feet deep in places, it looked like an ancient riverbed. A small town composed of tents had sprung up around the dig. Curious natives came from miles to see the crazy people sweating in the tropical heat just to find something the natives had never cared about. Looking for proof the Incas had been in the area earlier than expected, they enventually uncovered the remains of a small village that appeared as if the Incas had built it.
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