Centralia
Page 1
“Every time I read a Mike Dellosso inspirational thriller, I find a new favorite—until another hits bookstores that tops the last. Definitely the best yet, Centralia is not just a nonstop thrill ride with Dellosso’s signature spine-chilling suspense edged with the supernatural. It is a deeply moving story of one man’s desperate search for all that has been ripped from him—family, identity, honor—and ultimately his greatest loss and heart longing—a restored relationship with the heavenly Father all logical evidence would indicate has abandoned him. Centralia is a story I will not soon forget.”
JEANETTE WINDLE, award-winning author of Veiled Freedom, Freedom’s Stand, and Congo Dawn
“With mind-bending twists and tangled truths, Centralia is one killer story! Mike Dellosso has outdone himself with this heart-pounding story of one man’s fight to find the truth—but is it the real truth? This one will keep you guessing right to the end. If you’re a Bourne addict like me, you can’t afford to miss this novel!”
RONIE KENDIG, bestselling author of Raptor 6 and Hawk
“Mike Dellosso’s Fearless packs an emotional punch. His engaging characters and riveting plot pull the reader right into the story. He’s a true craftsman!”
TOM PAWLIK, Christy Award–winning author of Vanish, Valley of the Shadow, and Beckon
“Mike spins a tale that combines suspense and compassion, intrigue and hope. Born of fire but created in love, [Fearless] is a ride that will keep you wondering until you turn the final page.”
ACE COLLINS, bestselling author of The Yellow Packard and Darkness before Dawn
“With hints of Frank Peretti and Stephen King, The Hunted is a chilling debut.”
CRESTON MAPES, author of Nobody
“A vicious enemy, a family secret, a thirst for revenge, and a need for reconciliation all drive The Hunted from intriguing beginning to thrilling conclusion.”
KATHRYN MACKEL, author of Vanished
“Read this someplace safe as you experience the incredibly descriptive world of The Hunted. And sleep with the lights on.”
AUSTIN BOYD, author of the Mars Hill Classified trilogy
Visit Tyndale online at www.tyndale.com.
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Centralia
Copyright © 2015 by Mike Dellosso. All rights reserved.
Cover photograph copyright © by Sascha Burkard/Dollar Photo Club. All rights reserved.
Designed by Dean H. Renninger
Edited by Caleb Sjogren
Published in association with the literary agency of Les Stobbe, 300 Doubleday Road, Tryon, NC 28782.
Scripture taken from the New King James Version,® copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Centralia is a work of fiction. Where real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales appear, they are used fictitiously. All other elements of the novel are drawn from the author’s imagination.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dellosso, Mike.
Centralia / Mike Dellosso.
pages ; cm
ISBN 978-1-4143-9041-3 (softcover)
1. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3604.E446C46 2015
813'.6—dc23 2015000555
ISBN 978-1-4964-0676-7 (ePub); ISBN 978-1-4143-9042-0 (Kindle); ISBN 978-1-4964-0677-4 (Apple)
Build: 2015-04-02 16:13:58
For Jen
I remember when you told me,
“Live like it’s already happened.”
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Acknowledgments
Discussion Questions
About the Author
Peter Ryan tossed his head back, rested it against the leather wingback chair, and stared at the ceiling. A symmetrical swirl pattern in the plaster covered the entire surface. He wondered how long it had taken the plasterer to complete it. Must have required a ton of patience. These old buildings had such unique touches, such character and craftsmanship. The longer he stared at it, the more the pattern appeared to move and shift and change. The swirls curved in alternating directions, some clockwise, some counterclockwise, like an intricate network of cogs and gears skillfully crafted by a master clockmaker.
“Something you want to talk about?”
The gears on the ceiling halted their motion. Peter tilted his chin down and eyed Dr. Audrey Lewis. She was a plump woman, full-figured with a large frame that fit nicely into her pantsuit. With her glasses on the end of her nose and her legs casually crossed, she smiled at Peter and waited for his response. Walter Chaplin, the departmental dean at the university, had insisted he see her, said it would do him good to talk to someone, to get things off his chest and out of his mind.
Peter wasn’t so sure. He’d seen Lewis three times already, and she’d been no help. All she did was listen and ask questions, smile, and take notes. He could get that from any child in any first-grade classroom. And what did she do with all the notes she took, anyway? No doubt she used them as fodder for her social-media alter ego.
But there was no use resisting. If Chaplin wanted him to use Lewis as a psychological dumping ground, he would do it. It certainly didn’t harm him any or cost him anything but a couple hours a week. “I’ve been having the dream again.”
Lewis’s eyes went to her notepad. “The house.”
“Yes.”
She looked up, eyeing him like an interesting specimen to be poked and jabbed, dissected and studied, and finally pinned to a foam board. “And the rooms—are they the same?”
“Yes.”
“Same layout?”
“Yes.”
“Same number of rooms?”
Peter closed his eyes and filled his memory with the inside of the house that he’d been visiting in his dreams. “Same everything.” It had two stories, mostly unfurnished, and every room seemed to contain pieces to a giant puzzle; only the pieces never fit neatly together. The first-floor
living area consisted of four spacious rooms. There was also a kitchen he’d never entered, only caught a glimpse of the tiled floor and white cabinetry. The second story had a hallway lined with four rooms along the right side. The walls were gray, the wood worn. It was an old house, well used, stately yet sad. Many memories hid in the walls and paint and floorboards.
Lewis was quiet for a long moment, and Peter didn’t know if she was thinking about a response or waiting for him to continue.
Finally, “Go on.”
He sighed and recalled his latest dream, which had been exactly like all the other ones. “I’m in this house, the same house.”
“And does it look familiar yet?”
“Nope. Never seen it before except in my dreams.” At least not that he remembered.
“Go on.” Those were two of Lewis’s favorite words, and combined, they made up the majority of her contribution to shrink sessions.
The office was a room in Lewis’s home. She lived down a county road, five miles outside of town. With the windows open, the curtains moved gently on a midafternoon breeze, but the outside world was quiet save for the occasional bird singing or squirrel chattering.
“I seem to have access to every room, just like always, except that one.”
“Does the door look the same?”
“Everything’s the same. The staircase, the hallway, the doors. They’re all the same. Nothing ever changes.”
“And did you go in any of the rooms?”
“Sure. I made my way down the hallway, just like I always do, checking each room. I have a feeling like I’m looking for something. An urgent feeling.”
Lewis cleared her throat and apologized. “The same feeling you’ve had before.”
Peter nodded. “Same as always.”
“And what did you find in the rooms?”
“Same stuff I always find. Mementos, different objects from my life, from childhood up to just a few weeks ago. My old baseball mitt. A stack of comic books. Spider-Man. Daredevil. Archie. The tuxedo I wore when Karen and I got married. Lilly’s favorite teddy bear. A pile of unpaid bills. Just the stuff of life. My life.”
“And do you find what you’re looking for?”
“Nope. The feeling never goes away.”
“Is Karen in one of the rooms?”
“Yes. The same room. Third one. She sits in a chair, one of those overstuffed ones you find in a furniture store. We had one just like it when we were newly married. Checkered blue and white with some flecks of red. We bought it with a Christmas bonus I got that year.”
“And did she talk this time?”
“She never talks.” Peter closed his eyes again and saw Karen in the chair, her legs crossed, skirt just above the knees, hair pulled back from her face. “But she looks like she wants to. She has that look on her face, you know, when someone has something to say but either doesn’t quite know how to say it or wants to but something’s holding them back. Do you know that look?”
“I do. And then what?”
“And then nothing. I say hi to her, tell her I love her, ask her what’s wrong, but there’s never any answer. I plead with her, tell her it doesn’t matter what it is—just tell me; I can handle it. But no answer.”
Again Lewis remained quiet as the clock on her desk ticked softly. A shadow flitted across the ceiling, a flutter of activity, and then it was gone. Probably a bird outside caught between the house and the sun’s midafternoon rays. Peter kept his eyes on the ceiling as those gears began to move again, setting in motion some major mechanism, maybe the machinery of his mind.
“And after finding Karen, do you still have the feeling that you’re looking for something?”
“Or someone. Yes.”
“So the someone you’re looking for isn’t Karen.”
Peter thought about that for a moment. He’d always assumed that he was looking for Karen. Or Lilly. But the feeling was persistent and wasn’t quenched with the discovery of Karen in the room. “I guess not.”
“What about the last room? It’s the same as always too?”
Peter massaged his hands and glanced around the office. It was nicely furnished, mostly with antiques. A floor lamp in the corner always attracted his attention. Its carefully sculpted brass stand was polished to a high sheen, and from the top dangled a bell-shaped glass shade with a hand-painted stylized C on it. Peter often wondered what the C represented but had never asked Lewis about it. “Yes, the last room. It’s the same thing. I try to open the door, but it’s locked. I dig through my pockets—all of them, frantically—but I have no key. I have no way of opening the door. I think whatever or whoever I’m looking for is in that room.”
“That’s new.”
Peter lifted his head and looked at Dr. Lewis. “Is it?”
“I don’t remember you ever mentioning that before—that you know the room contains what you’re looking for.”
Peter thought back to his other dreams. They were so vivid, so real, he could still remember each one in detail. “Or who. And I suppose it is new. Does that mean something?” Peter didn’t really expect Lewis to answer his question directly.
“What do you think it means?”
“I thought you were supposed to have the answers.”
“I don’t have all the answers. In fact, I have few answers. More times than not, the answers are in you.”
“Well, give this one your best shot.”
Lewis removed her glasses and placed her notepad and pen on the little round colonial table with a tripod pedestal beside her chair. “I think it means your subconscious mind is keeping something from you.”
“Keeping secrets?”
“In a sense. Protecting you from some memory you may not be ready to recall, some event in your life you may not be ready to deal with.”
Peter drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair. “So what do I have to do?”
Lewis laced her fingers and rested her hands on her lap. She looked directly at Peter as if she were about to reveal to him not only the secrets of his past but the mysteries of the universe. “Find the key.”
Peter Ryan rolled to his side and peeled open his eyes. Hazy, early-morning light filtered through the blinds and cast the bedroom in a strange, dull, watery hue. For a moment, his mind fogged by the remnants of a dream filled with mystery and anxiety, he thought he was still in the same unfamiliar house, exploring room after room until he came to that one room, the room with the locked door that would allow him no entrance. He closed his eyes.
Peter pawed at the door, smacked it with an open hand. He had to open it; behind it was something . . . something . . . A shadow moved along the gap between the door and the worn wood flooring. Peter took a step away from the door and held his breath. The shadow was there again. Back and forth it paced, slowly, to the beat of some unheard funeral dirge. Somebody was in that room. Peter groped and grasped at the doorknob once again, tried to turn it, twist it, but it felt as if it were one with the wood of the door, as if the entire contraption had been carved from a single slab of oak.
Peter gasped and flipped open his eyes, expecting morning sunlight to rush in and blind him, but it was earlier than he thought. Dusty autumn light only filled the room enough to cast shadows, odd things with awkward angles and distorted proportions that hid in the corners and lurked where walls met floor.
He couldn’t remember last night. What had he done? What time had he gone to bed? He’d slept so soundly, so deeply, as if he were dead and only now life had been reinfused into him. Sleep pulled at him, clung to his eyes and mind like a spiderweb. It was all he could do to keep his eyes open. But even then, his mind kept wanting to return to some hazy fog, some place of gray void that would usher him back to the house, back to the second story, back to the door and that pacing shadow and the secrets it protected.
He shifted his weight and moved to his back. Hands behind his head, he forced his eyes to stay open and ran them around the room. It was a habit of his, checking every roo
m he entered, corner to corner. What he was checking for he didn’t know. Gremlins? Gnomes? The bogeyman? Or maybe just anything that appeared out of . . .
There, in the far corner, between the dresser and the wall, a misplaced shadow. No straight sides, no angles. It was the form of a person, a woman. Karen. His wife.
Peter lifted his head and squinted through light as murky as lake water. Why was . . . ?
“Karen?”
But she didn’t move.
“Karen, is that you? What are you doing, babe?”
Still no movement, not even a shift in weight or subtle pulsing of breath. For a moment, he didn’t know if he was awake or asleep or caught in some middle hinterland of half slumber where rules of reason were broken routinely, where men walked on the ceiling and cats talked and loved ones roamed the earth as shadowy specters.
Peter reached for the lamp to his right and clicked it on. Light illuminated the room and dispelled the shadows. If he wasn’t awake before, he certainly was now. The corner was empty, the image of Karen gone.
Propped on one elbow, Peter sighed, rubbed his eyes, and shook his head. He kicked off the blanket and swung his legs over the edge of the bed, sat there with his head in his hands, fingers woven through his hair. The remaining fog was dispersing; the cloudy water receded. His head felt heavy and thick as if someone had poured concrete into his cranium and sealed it shut again. The smell of toast and frying bacon reached him then, triggering his appetite. His mouth began to water. His stomach rumbled like an approaching storm.
And that’s when it hit him, as suddenly and forcefully as if an unseen intruder had emerged from the fog, balled its bony hand, and punched him in the chest.
He needed to see Karen, needed to tell her something.
It was not some mere inclination either, like remembering to tell her he needed deodorant when she went to the supermarket. No, this was an urgent yearning, a need like he’d never experienced before. As if not only their happiness or comfort depended on it but her very existence. He had information she needed, information without which she would be empty and incomplete, yet he had no idea what that information was. His mind was a whiteboard that had been wiped clean.