CONTENTS
Dedication
Chapter One - Prologue
Chapter Two - The Recurring Dream ( Present Day )
Chapter Three - Reconnaisance ( 1968 )
Chapter Four - Therapy Part One ( Present Day )
Chapter Five - The Organ Grinder ( 1968 )
Chapter Six - Therapy Part Two ( Present Day )
Chapter Seven - Carved Monkeys ( 1968 )
Chapter Eight - The Rule Mansion ( 1968 )
Chapter Nine - Vacancy in Cabin Six ( 1968 )
Chapter Ten - Therapy Part Three ( Present Day )
Chapter Eleven - An Unexpected Connection ( Present Day )
Chapter Twelve - A Boat Ride ( 1968 )
Chapter Thirteen - The Motorcycle Trip ( Present Day )
Chapter Fourteen - A Boat Ride Part Two ( 1968 )
Chapter Fifteen - Homecoming Part One ( Present Day )
Chapter Sixteen - Covert Ops ( 1968 )
Chapter Seventeen - The Day of the Fire( 1968 )
Chapter Eighteen - Homecoming Part Two ( Present Day )
Chapter Nineteen - The Day of the Fire Part Two ( 1968 )
Chapter Twenty - Homecoming Part Three ( Present Day )
Chapter Twenty-One - The Night of the Fire Part One ( 1968 )
Chapter Twenty-Two - Homecoming Part Four ( Present Day )
Chapter Twenty-Three - The Night of the Fire Part Two ( 1968 )
Chapter Twenty-Four - Homecoming Part Five ( Present Day )
Chapter Twenty-Five - The Night of the fire Part Three ( 1968 )
Chapter Twenty-Six - Homecoming Part Six ( Present Day )
Chapter Twenty-Seven - In the Dark ( 1968 )
Chapter Twenty-Eight - At the Resort ( Present Day )
Chapter Twenty-Nine - The Search Day One (1968 )
Chapter Thirty - The Tower ( Present Day )
Chapter Thirty-One - The Rescue ( 1968 )
Chapter Thirty-Two - The Answer ( Present Day )
Chapter Thirty-Three - Epilogue The Way Out
This book is dedicated to my wife Debbie,
and my two girls
Evamarie and Callie
CHAPTER ONE
Prologue
his is my first novel. Being a visual artist and a creative, I had often mused about what it would be like to write a book. I knew that I had the imagination for a story but I was an abysmal student of English at Warren Township High School in Gurnee IL. Most of the time when I should have been studying in English class, I would be doodling away ignorant of the material and clueless to what the teacher was talking about. My failing grades reflected my poor attitude for the subject; thinking a person had no real need for diagraming a sentence or defining an adjective. I have always had a voracious appetite for reading though, and somehow that appetite has helped me to muddle through this whole endeavor and arrive at a finished product.
Some of my childhood friends and acquaintances who were fortunate enough to grow up and in and around Wildwood and Gages Lake Illinois in the sixties and seventies will no doubt recognize familiar names and places. Some of you will find that the despicable character which holds your moniker is not at all like you. I have used familiar names only to hasten the writing, not to sully someone’s good name or besmirch anyone’s good character.
There was a real mansion on the shores of Gages Lake which was really owned by a man named Rule and the mansion really did burn down. The fire is the impetus for my story, nothing more. The mansion is as close to reality as this book will ever get. The plot in the book which surrounds the fire is completely fictitious and should be treated as such.
The Nerroth’s store and the Mogg’s store still reside in physical form on the north side of Gages Lake and like the book, they are either abandoned or greatly changed.
Some cousins and a few friends had the pleasant experience of vacationing with my family at Spider Lake Resort in Rhinelander Wisconsin and they could probably tell you a story of their own about the resort’s charming little resident which I will not yet mention.
Those of you who are still involved with me personally will no doubt see similarities in the story to the course my recent life has taken. I feel that it is safest as a beginning writer, to write what you know.
To the young reader;
The present world is a very different place than it was as a boy growing up in northern Illinois in the sixties. Back in the day there were no personal computers, just the ones with all the blinking lights in the science-fiction movies. Real computers occupied huge climate-controlled rooms in giant corporations.
There were no smart phones, dumb phones, or cell phones of any kind. Phones were rotary dialed, meaning you put your finger into a hole and turned it. They were tethered down with spiral chords which were always too short and were always tangled.
There was no internet and no cable television. In 1968 a marvel such as a hand-held calculator would not be on the market for another two years at the cost of about $385 dollars, ( a huge amount of money at that time ).
The high-technology in the world of an eleven year old in 1968 would have been an occasional glance at a color TV. Most ordinary people at that time had black-and-white TV sets.
In my own house, we had a sheet of colored transparent plastic, ( blue at the top and green on the bottom ) which we would attach to the television during a baseball game to mimic green grass and blue sky. There were no remote controls. Arguments would break out each time someone had to get up and walk over to the TV to change the station.
There were little more than half a dozen television stations to choose from. The highlights of viewing for an eleven-year-old boy would have been Star Trek, Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits and the much awaited Creature Features. Saturday night was Creature Feature night. There was no such thing as a microwave oven, so you would pop some corn in your mother’s pressure cooker atop the stove and then go watch your black and white monster movie.
On girls night, you would be forced to watch one of those dopey Gidget or silly Tammy movies. Ta-a-mmy Ta-a-mmy Tammy’s in love...yecch!! You simply had to leave the room on the girl’s television night.
The worst-case scenario was when your Grandma showed up for a couple week visit, causing Lawrence Welk and his Orchestra to take the place of Star Trek, being scheduled at the same time. There were no television recording devices yet invented to solve that Grandma problem.....
Most historians would talk about 1968 as a tumultuous year; a year of change. It was a year in which the counter-culture and anti-war movements would be at their apex. The Vietnam war was in full swing, partially fueling sit-ins by protesting college students at many of the world’s universities. Riots seemed to be everywhere in the large metropolitan areas. Police beating up hippies was the staple diet of video imagery each night on the evening news. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy would both be assassinated by June of that year.
But, for an eleven-year-old boy, these events were distant and obscure. They were events that only grown-ups paid attention to. An eleven year old boy would be more worried about whether they were a surfer or greaser, or if they were Beatles or Rolling Stones fans.
Your doors were never locked at night. As a child you had a perimeter and a time-frame which ruled your world. Do not go past this point and be home for dinner. The year of 1968 for an eleven-year-old living on Gages Lake was pretty close to lake-life nirvana.
One last thing. Each year in the summer my family would travel from the suburbs of Chicago to northern Wisconsin on vacation. It was like going back in time. Sometimes it was so primitive the only thing missing was an occasional spear-killing of a dinosaur. A kid had to find his own fun which took a lot of thought; and was not always easy. Other than an
occasional diversion the basic plan was fish in the morning, swim and ride sting-ray bikes during the day, and have a fire and listen to the radio at night. If you were lucky, you might even pick up Super C F L which was the station of choice in the suburbs of Chicago.
In 1968 an ounce of gold ( one coin ) was worth about thirty-nine dollars, which could almost buy you a new Schwinn Stingray bike priced at fifty-one dollars. Three one ounce gold coins would pay a month’s rent. The market price for a one ounce coin of gold while writing this book was around seventeen hundred dollars.
CHAPTER TWO
The Recurring Dream ( Present Day )
en Fisher woke as usual from a dream-troubled sleep very early on Saturday morning. It was mid June and he could hear through his open window that the birds were already up singing. The sun was just below the horizon. In an hour it would begin to light the eastern sky. Jill was still asleep beside him so he quietly climbed out of bed, not wanting to wake her. Ben could hardly remember the last time he had slept in, much less had a good night’s sleep. The dream had caused him to wake up again. How many countless nights had his sleep been ended due to it? He couldn’t remember.
Before the loss of his job, the dream only came on occasion and usually he was too busy to even think of it. The business side of his brain would take over and erase it, replacing it with the concerns of the day.
Sometimes, as he rode the train into the city, bits and pieces of it might drift back into his consciousness, but generally the dream only came to him on the nights when he was at his busiest during the day or when he had very large problems troubling him. In this way, the dream was almost always forgotten before Ben ever had a chance to think about it.
Now, with his life falling apart at the seams; when he really could use the rest, Ben was re-living the dream nearly every night. The bad thing about the dream was not so much that it was displeasing, but rather it always woke him prematurely. He had tried every form of over-the-counter sleep medications in an effort to sleep through the night, but they were of no help. He had also tried self-medicating with alcohol, but in a short while he realized that excessive drinking was only adding to his sleep problems.
He tip-toed down the stairs and zig-zagged across the living room. He was careful not to step on the sleeping twins. They had fallen asleep on the carpeted floor, having played Nintendo late into the previous night. Waking them would interrupt the only time of day which offered him any peace and quiet.
He closed the switch on the big flat-screen, and wondered to himself what would become of the boys when they had to leave this house. It was the only home they had ever known. He tried to put the thought out of his mind and focus on the task at hand which was brewing coffee.
After the loss of his job, Ben had used his all of his 401k retirement money to keep up with the house payments. Later when the money ran out, he tried to have the mortgage loan modified but the bank would not cooperate. With only five years left on his mortgage, Ben had been planning for retirement. Now it seemed that he would lose everything.
At first, he assumed that another job would be easy to get. He would be able to replenish his nest-egg over the ten good work-years left in him. Later, he realized that it was nearly impossible to find employment. After countless revisions of his resume and a forced education in the use of keywords, Ben had attracted only two interviews in three years. He sent his resume via e-mail each day in the evening and when the companies were courteous enough to answer, they always sent him the same response: “Due to the overwhelming amount of applicants, your resume may not — yada yada yada blah blah blah.” He was beginning to lose all hope of ever earning a living wage again.
Ben shuffled into the kitchen. He looked out the back window as he was spooning the coffee into the paper filter. He saw just how bad the back yard was looking. There was a sticker bush by the fire pit that was at least three feet tall. He had stopped doing any repairs on the place and maintaining the lawn was not high on his priority list now that the bank was foreclosing. He had no money left, and even if he did he had no stake in keeping the place up any longer. “Let the bank have it as it is.” he thought to himself.
With the coffee brewing, he threaded his way through the labyrinth of the sleeping twins to the bathroom and took a warm shower. After shaving, he dressed and headed out to the front porch with hot coffee in hand. He wondered what the day would bring. Jill had made his appointment. He tried to put it out of his mind.
The Sun was now peeking above the eastern horizon, painting the abstract morning sky with beautiful pastel hues of orange, yellow, and cerulean blue. The sunrise helped Ben to forget his troubles. He loved the morning. It was always his favorite time of day. When he went back for his second cup of coffee, Jill was in the kitchen pouring one of her own.
“Why are you up so early?” Ben asked.
“Good morning to you as well,” she replied sarcastically.
“I’m sorry. Good morning. I was hoping you would be able to sleep in today.”
“No, I heard you again.”
“I thought that maybe I might have been quieter this time. You looked like you were asleep when I climbed out of bed.”
“No, I was just laying there with my eyes shut.”
Ben knew that when he had the dream he would mumble garbled words, usually ending in an unintelligible shout.
“Are you going to see Doctor Levine today?” She asked.
“Jill, I don’t think we can afford—”
She cut his words off mid sentence. “You promised me you would see him today! You know you can’t go on night after night having this awful dream wake us! You promised you would see him! How long does this have to go on Ben? You know how hard it is to get a Saturday appointment? He only sees people one Saturday a month!”
Jill had the look on her face that Ben was all too familiar with. It was the look that said, “You do not want to mess with me on this one.” Ben didn’t often get that look, but he had learned during their twenty-three years of marriage to walk away from it whenever possible.
“Okay okay I will go in and see the shrink Jill. I don’t know how he can help me, but I will give it a try.”
Ben could read on Jill’s face that he had said enough to put out the fire.He asked, “When is the appointment?”
“One thirty.” She answered back curtly. “You know very well when the appointment is Ben! Why do you ask when I have been reminding you for two days?”
He could see the fire beginning to ignite again and he knew he had better zip it and take his coffee back outside. “I promise I will go in but I still don’t know how a total stranger can help me.”
He spun around before his wife could answer and having managed to get in the last word, he got out while the getting was good. As he was making his way back through to the front door, Ben could hear that the twins were awake by the sounds of the explosions on the flat screen. “Sometimes I wish I had never bought that system.” He thought to himself.
Later, when he was driving to the shrink’s office, Ben tried to imagine what the psychiatrist visit would be like. He had never been to a shrink in his life and he pondered over whether or not he should tell all that was really bothering him or if he should play it cool and ease in over time to the heavy stuff.
He imagined the doctor placing him into a mental institution at the drop of a hat. He had seen “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” more than a few times, and shock therapy was not one of his short-term goals. He could feel the anxiety welling up inside him with each passing mile. He felt like he was driving to an inquisition. He turned right onto Corporate Drive and he knew that he was within minutes of arriving at the office. He thought about turning the car around, but the look on his wife’s face that morning was enough to keep him moving towards the feared shrink’s modern office building.
He was early. He parked in the lot, but was in no hurry to go in. He rolled down both front windows of his car. He sat inside, even though the temperature outsid
e was climbing towards the predicted ninety degrees.
“It is going to be a hot, dry summer.” He thought to himself.
As he was sitting there, an orange-colored county truck rolled up fifty yards from where he was parked. It slowly backed and turned in an arcing movement to be close as possible to the “dead end” sign which was at the corner. Two men climbed out of each side of the truck, and one said to the other, “It’s starting to get hot out now Tom.”
The other man didn’t answer. The talkative one climbed into the back of the truck, chatting all the way, and in two minutes time, with power-drill in hand, removed a perfectly good existing sign, and replaced it with a brand-new one. Two minutes of work. Two bolts.
Ben watched the two men as they climbed back into the truck. He wondered why the sign needed replacing. He expected the men to drive away with some urgency to their next sign-changing location, but the orange truck just sat there. He watched the truck for what seemed like fifteen minutes. He looked at his watch. He thought about his own unemployment. He wondered why it took two guys to change a street sign.
Looking at his watch again, he realized he had run out of time. He had to face the music inside the office building with the shrink. He was still looking at the orange truck as he walked through the doors to the building foyer. The thought of the two men sitting out there doing nothing in an obvious patronage job angered him. He tried to put it out of his mind. He didn’t want the shrink to send him to the funny farm.
As he walked through the double-doors to the large waiting room, Ben thought at first that he had mistakenly entered into an up-scale fish store for the very rich, or possibly the foyer of Sea World. On each wall, there stood large built-in aquariums filled with brightly colored tropical fish. Ben scanned the room looking at each of the tanks, and then his attention stopped at the receptionist’s desk. He was in the right place.
Spider Lake Page 1