Fear Of Darkness
A serial novel by Joe Lake.
(So far: Julie’s husband has an accident, after which he disappears. Julie goes to the police and then returns to the campervan, which is gone. She books into a motel. In the night, a kidnapper demands money over the telephone for her husband’s return. At the police station the next morning, in the two-way mirror over the counter, she sees the door open by itself and when she looks, a young couple enter. “Vampires,” she thinks but is told that it is a trick of the light.)
The next morning, as Julie slowly wakes in the double bed in the Winnebago, she finds someone lying next to her. The grey of morning is slowly seeping through the van’s blinds as she tries to recall the previous day when she was put to bed by the girl detective who embraced her sleepy body kindly and seemed to give her a love bite that made her drift into oblivion where she dreamt of floating and flying like a seagull through the night, circling way above the city of Burnie to the hypnotic blinking of the harbour lights.
Slowly her consciousness returns as she tries to focus on the ceiling of the mobile home. She daren’t touch the person sleeping next to her as she is afraid that it might be one of the detectives of the previous night. Then she notices the person’s gentle snore is clearly that of her husband who had disappeared and who could not, possibly, be lying there next to her after all that has happened. “It must all have been a dream”, she whispers to herself: “The woman in the park with the Obama mask and the rocking of the van and the shotgun and her husband falling backwards; then ambulance arriving and the police and then her husband’s disappearance and the missing van; then her interview at the Burnie police station where she had seen the two young people she thought were detectives and who had had no image in the mirror and her suspicion of vampirism.
“Bob, is that you?” she whispers. “Bob?”
The person next to her takes a deep in-breath, sits up, stretches both arms and exhales deeply with a kind of relief. “Julie, you awake?”
She held her breath for a moment and said, “Yes, dear. Did you have a good sleep?”
“Yes, I did. There was a kind of dream where I had been whisked away. It seemed so real.”
Julie snuggles up to him. As she stretches towards him, she feels a slight sting on the right hand side of her throat and when she touches it, she feels two small scabs like a snake bite.
(To be continued next month.)
