It isn’t
always what’s in the dark that you should be afraid of…
When Chrys
asks her brother Spencer for help to clean a foreclosed house for the bank,
neither expects their lives to be on the line. It’s supposed to be a simple Sunday: take
pictures…clean out the house…collect the cash.
Chrys and Spencer are plunged into a fight for their lives when the
house reveals unspeakable horrors.
…Sometimes
things in the light are even more deadly.
One of the writers I have always looked
up to is Stephen King. I will first
admit that I am not a huge fan of his novels. I’m scared of the dark and scared
of the thoughts that build in my head when I’m in the dark, but I have read a
few and seen most of the movies based on his novels. One thing I really enjoy about them is
finding the little connections between the novels. For instance there is an organization called
The Shop which shows up in a few of his novels or is just mentioned as being
the reason for whatever freaky stuff happens.
A character from his novel THE SHINING appears in a flashback in the
novel IT. Then, also from IT, the
character Eddie Kaspbrak’s family used to live next door to Paul Sheldon’s
family who is the main character in MISERY.
The list goes on and on so much that people have made ever growing
flowcharts dedicated to it.
I accidentally started connecting my
novels together with tiny tidbits from the start. In RED ISLAND one character is reading a
novel I wrote 14 years ago and will be publishing later this year. In RED SERGE some characters listen to a CD
purchased from a singer at the Farmers’ Market.
On the CD is a song called RED ISLAND.
In THE CISTERN I took the connections a
little further. The female singer who sold
the CD’s in Serge is a full blown character this time around. She is found in a cinderblock room along with
the dead body of another woman. When
Spencer and Chrys find her they also find a case of her CD’s. Back in Serge, it is also mentioned about a
cook coming to work at The Alcrest Gastropub which is more than the central
setting in THE CISTERN. It is a
character in itself.
As time goes on there are going to be
more connections from one novel to the next.
The hardest part is making a connection to a novel that has not even
been written yet. Though I am working on
it. My thriller and mystery series will
be coming together when characters from the other show up at THE ALCREST.
There are a couple other connections in
THE CISTERN to my other novels, but you’ll have to check them out to find them.
Chapter Four
Maeve Campbell’s
head snapped up. The back of her cranium
bounced off one cinder block wall then another.
For one brief confused moment she didn’t know where she was. Then the smell hit her and her body shivered
with violence. Was the smell worse? Was the
water colder? Was that woman’s body
still out there in the dark?
She had been
dreaming. She actually fell asleep
sitting in the corner. And she
dreamed. There were daisies again, only
this time they were woven in and out of her long blond hair. Her mother always said Maeve belonged in the
sixties, a flower child reborn. She
stood on a beach and her bare feet dug into the sand as the ocean's waves came
over them. A strand of green seaweed
wrapped around her calf. She wore a shear red dress that flowed with
the wind and danced on the surface of the water. You could see the outline of her body when
the light was right. Her guitar hung
from one hand beside
her.
The rotting smell
was back. There were no flowers in her
hair, no seaweed around her leg.
She saw nothing in the darkness.
What made her
waken? There was no water dripping from
the pipe. She struggled to hear if there
were any sounds, but the hits to her head made it ring from inside her skull. Perhaps she just woke because it was
time. She longed to be back in her
dream.
What
was that? There was a sound. She knew the top of this room had a wood
ceiling and above that was another. Was it all the way up there? Was it all in her head? Was it Enid? Maybe she had come back to life and wanted
revenge for being eaten.
There was the sound
again. Footsteps? It was so faint she could barely hear it over
the ringing. Her heart pounded. It was him.
Maybe he was back to kill her. Maybe
he was back to finally do the things she feared the most. She
knew some of
what he had done to the other woman. Her
body ached from the games he had played already. She felt so week.
She pushed away
from the corner. Maeve didn’t want this
to go on.
More sounds came
from above, something along the floor.
Something scraped like it was dragged.
Another woman?
He’s
found another. If he had another girl to play with then this
might be
Maeve’s last chance. She was going
to be held under the water.
She rolled forward
onto her hands and knees and began crawling through the water. She couldn’t see, but knew where the trap
door was. She had to get under it,
behind it almost so that she would still be in the shadows when the door
opened. Her hand fell on the leg of the
dead woman. Enid.
Her hand flinched away. She gently
put her hand back on the body and followed
down the leg to her toes. At the far wall
she let her hands crawl upward until she was standing. Her weak legs wobbled beneath her. Her ankle was in violent pain.
Unless she was lucky,
she wasn’t going to win. Maeve knew her
only chance was to grab him when he looked in with his flashlight. All of the possibilities played through her
mind. Either way she was going to fight. She was going to claw and scratch and kick
and bite until either she killed him or he ended it. She widened her stance, arms out to keep
balance.
Where
was he?
She felt an almost
excitement growing inside her. She had
tried to be nice to everyone her entire life, but she was going to kill the
next person that came through that trap door.
For more on Lorne Oliver and his books, check out the following:
Twitter @LorneOliver
