FORSAKEN
A Novel
By
Andrew A. Van Wey
Copyright Notice
Forsaken is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s grotesque imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living and dead, real or surreal, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental (a coinkydink).
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce portions thereof, in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, uploaded, reverse engineered, channeled through the nether, or shared in any form, digital or otherwise, without the express written permission of the author. Please support creativity by purchasing only authorized editions via proper channels.
Cover Art by Christopher M.R.
www.behance.net/ChristopherM
Chapter Art by Andrew Van Wey
www.andrewvanwey.com
eISBN: 978-0-9840157-0-2
v1.18.12
Author’s Note: The utmost care has been taken to ensure this copy is free of formatting, spelling, grammar mistakes, and all others sorts of evil nastiness brought about by the pairing of letters into words, words into sentences, and so forth. In a perfect world this would be a perfect book.
However, the truth is that even with over a dozen beta readers, eight drafts, a year of work, two fried laser printers, and two editors, mistakes may still make it through. If this ruins your enjoyment of the book I suggest you apply for a refund and seek out something else.
If you’re still on board and you do come across an error, please feel free to make me aware of it at: [email protected]. All reports are greatly appreciated and will be thanked in all future editions.
Copyright © 2011 Andrew Van Wey.
eBook Edition
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For Marissa,
My ideal reader, my ideal person.
Couldn’t have, wouldn’t have, done this all without you.
PROLOGUE
My Brother’s Keeper
THE CHILDREN SCREAMED and ran.
“One, two, three...” began the girl with strawberry hair as she tucked her face into her freckled arms, which were in turn pressed into the bark of the old oak tree that stood atop the hill like a watchtower.
“Four, five, six,” her voice echoed and carried like a lingering dream, down the hillside and over the twilight fields below.
Small feet carried the children past the flicker and hum of fireflies, past the tall grass and rocks, past each other. Some ran east, away from the hill and the tree and the old orphanage beyond. Others ran westward, turning to silhouettes backlit by the amaranthine glow of the Nebraska sunset. A few of the first and second graders took refuge in the tall grass, bending the reeds over themselves, like cicadas hiding away for the season.
“Ten, eleven, twelve,” her voice echoed.
Down the hill, two shadows ran faster than all the others.
“Stop following me!” shouted David to his younger brother behind. “You’ll get us caught!”
“No I won’t,” Daniel whined, huffing, trying to catch up.
As brothers they couldn’t have been more different. Daniel was small, scrawny, even for a ten year old. He hated sports, was scared of the dark, and was prone to stuttering when nervous, which were most of his waking hours. He was an easy target for the bullies, of which there were many at the orphanage.
At thirteen, David was larger than most of the children. Not long after he discovered hair beneath his armpits he sent a boy to the town hospital with three teeth bent backwards for calling him a nasty name.
Crazy Davey.
Two of the teeth had to be replaced but the nickname was never uttered again. To David, the month in detention and forced apology were small prices to pay for the outburst. Violence didn’t solve everything, but it had solved that. It put him back atop the list of kids no one wanted to fuck with. To him, that was a good place to be.
“Come on... you always get the good hiding spots!” called Daniel, falling further behind in the tall grass.
“Cause you’ll blab and tell everyone!” David shouted.
Both of these facts were true. David did have the best hiding spots and Daniel did blab. Part of Daniel wished he could sniff out a dark corner and stay hidden like his older brother, always the last to be found. But another part couldn’t resist showing others how smart David was to find such places. Places he was too scared to search out alone, yet places he knew of due to his brother’s courage.
“Twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight,” cried the girl, her voice now a mere whisper over the cicadas, her body a simple shadow beneath the distant oak.
“Please? I promise I won’t blab!” Daniel wheezed, stopping.
She was already to thirty, David realized. Past the point of no return. If he didn’t take his younger brother with him they’d both get caught, Daniel first. That tag along would spend the remaining twenty count trying to hide behind a rock half his size and, in the light of the setting sun, he’d cast a long shadow. A shadow that would draw immediate attention. Inevitably, Daniel would blab and point in the direction David had run, and that would be that, same as it always was. Game over.
“Please David? Pleeeease?”
She reached thirty-five. Fifteen more to go.
“Okay, fine!” David snapped. He grabbed Daniel’s sweaty hand and pulled him through the tall grass. “Keep up.”
This, to Daniel, was happiness. Or as close as he’d come to knowing it in his ten years. Whenever his big brother looked after him, no one bothered him. No one gave him wedgies, Charlie horses, or called him names. In David’s shadow, he was invincible.
“Where are we guh... guh... going?” asked Daniel, forcing the lump from his throat.
“You’ll see,” David answered.
Daniel glanced back at the distant shapes of the other orphans, all looking for their own hiding spot. He saw Raphael, the Arapaho kid from the lower dorm, legs clattering in metal braces as he tried to follow them.
“You find your own fucking spot, don’t follow us!” David shouted, yanking Daniel further down the hill as Raphael clattered to a stop.
“She’s almuh-most to fifty,” Daniel said.
He had counted along in his head. He kept perfect time, a talent learned at night, conjuring monsters from the shadows and counting the seconds between flashes of lightning and crashes of thunder. He could count to a minute like a clock.
Forty-eight, forty-nine, he thought.
“Ready or not! Here I come!” shouted the girl with strawberry hair from that distant hill top.
“Get down,” David whispered and yanked him down, hard enough to knock the wind from him.
They listened. Beyond the humming cicadas, a child screamed out.
“Found you!” called the girl.
Hide and seek had always scared Daniel. There was something cruel and futile about it. It reminded him of a monster movie he’d seen in the common room, late one night. A brother and a sister visit a cemetery. “They’re coming to get you, Baa-buu-rah,” the brother jokes and the sister squirms.
Then the dead people come and get him.
The sister runs and hides in a house with others but more monsters come, building an army of the dead, changing the world bit by bit until escape is impossible. Hiding merely delays an impeding doom and, for the final few survivors, their fate is the worst. Instead of being turned to zombies, they are consumed.
“Found you too!” the girl’s distant voice laughed.
“Stop daydreaming!” David punched Daniel in the shoulder, hard. “Over here... be quiet okay?”
David led the way, crawling through the grass beneath fire flies floating like tiny stars. Daniel felt as if, for a moment, he was swimming in a cosmic sea. Then they emerged at the end of the field and Daniel’s mouth fell open.
“Whoa...”
He found himself staring at an old house. Red paint, long faded and chipped, clung to slanted walls. The windows were broken and boarded up. An old swing creaked in the breeze, hanging by a single rusted chain.
“Come on in,” said David, walking up the porch. “Door’s open.”
Daniel knew the house, or at least, knew of it. He’d heard stories of a place older kids snuck off to at night to smoke cigarettes and look at pictures of naked women.
“Isn’t this off limits?” Daniel asked. “Won’t we, you know, get in trouble?”
“Only if we get caught,” David answered, as if it were obvious. Then he paused, realization washing over his face. “You’re gonna blab about it!”
“N’uh-uh”
“Yeah you will, I know it! You’re gonna tell everyone!”
“No, I won’t.”
Another scream, then laughter from the hill behind them. The army of the dead had grown again.
“Promise? Promise you won’t tell?” David’s eyes narrowed.
“I promise.”
“Good,” David nodded. “Now get the fuck inside.”
Dim light cast dusty, orange lines through the slats and porous walls of the old house. The rooms were modest and compact, made for small families back when electricity was new and winters were long. The floorboards creaked beneath their feet, littered with cigarette butts. An explosion of movement from a dark corner made Daniel yelp. Blue feathers and the fluttering form a startled bird as it escaped through a broken window.
“Zip it you idiot!”
“Sorry,” Daniel mumbled, embarrassed.
“Jeez...”
David was moving fast. He’d been here before, several times. Just last month he’d brought Lily James here and she let him feel her up for a cigarette. But Lily didn’t know about his secret room. Few did.
“Whoa...” Daniel gasped as David slid an old set of drawers aside.
“Storm cellar,” said David, pulling on a metal ring on the door in the floor. “Cool huh?”
Daniel stared into the dark cellar. It was an abyss, and from within it came the smell of earth and decay.
“That’s your hiding puh-place?”
“Yep, come on.”
David disappeared below. Daniel took a deep breath. Through a broken window he glimpsed the distant oak tree and four figures moving through the tall grass not far away.
One shadow stopped.
“Got ya!”
The army grew as a fifth form joined it, metal bracers glinting around its leg. Soon they would descend upon the old cottage and he knew, like that late night zombie movie, the only way to survive was to hide.
Dappled light and decay spattered the old cement walls. The cellar air tasted like moss and old smoke. Daniel coughed.
“Shh...” David whispered as Daniel stifled a sneeze, eyes adjusting to the darkness. Vague shapes emerged. An old wine shelf clung to the cement wall by a few rusted bolts. A stuffed deer head lay in the corner next to a pile of cracked dolls. A sledgehammer, a workbench, and a dozen rusty railroad spikes. Years of cigarette butts and beer bottles rounded out the picture.
David turned his gaze to his brother as if working out a problem.
“What?” Daniel asked.
David nodded. “I’ve got an idea.”
He opened an old wooden trunk, pulled out some magazines and cigarettes, and threw them to the floor. Intrigued by the cover of a half naked woman, Daniel picked up the old magazine. An ad for whiskey. A man wearing a wristwatch and sitting atop a motorcycle. A woman with a braid of flowers around her neck, emerging from a river without clothes. His eyes descended to the mound of dark hair from where her legs and hips came together in a perfect V.
“Ewww,” he said out of reflex.
“Gonna ask her on a date?” David laughed.
“No way,” Daniel shook his head and David took back the magazine.
“Then stop staring and get in it. Come on!”
‘It,’ Daniel realized, was that old trunk, and the reason David had been studying him. He had been sizing him up.
“In there?” Daniel asked. “You’re crazy!”
David stiffened. “In there.”
The trunk space was small, confined. Cracked leather lined the outer edges held in by brass bolts that had lost their luster long ago. Even the wood was faded from years of neglect. Yet somehow that old trunk still retained its sturdy structure. It looked, Daniel thought, like it would take a dozen axe blows to break through. He did the measurements in his head but they didn’t add up.
“You’ll fit. I always do and I’m bigger. C’mon, hop in,” David slapped his brother’s back but Daniel felt no surge of confidence or assurance, only a vast chasm between himself and that old trunk.
“I... I don’t know,” Daniel gulped. “What if I get stuck?”
“You won’t! Just fold your knees in, trust me. C’mon!”
Daniel peered into the empty trunk. Even on his side, he’d have to curl up tight, tighter than he thought he could. And then there would be the darkness, and that he feared more than the lack of space. The darkness, he knew, would grow constricting the second the lid closed. Suffocating perhaps.
David sighed. “I thought you weren’t chicken.”
“I’m not chicken.”
“I thought you wanted to know my hiding spot.”
“I did!”
“Well, here it is!”
“But what about you?”
“I’ll be right over there.”
David pointed to the workbench. The old planks of a broken sawhorse created a perfect wall of shadow where he could lie in wait until their pursuers lost interest and moved on. Daniel preferred that spot to the trunk immensely.
“Can I hide there? Please?”
“You know what? Just forget it,” David said, slamming the trunk closed, sending curls of dust up into the dim light. “Let’s just go, okay?”
“We’ll get caught, we’ll get in trouble.”
“Whatever,” David said. “I’ve already got detention.” He started back towards the stairs.
“No, wait... I’ll... I’ll do it. Okay?”
“You sure?” David answered with a raised eyebrow that gave him an almost comic look.
Daniel wasn’t sure, he knew this much, but he would pretend he was. Every instinct in his body screamed against the decision. Still, he had to make himself strong. He had to show his brother he wasn’t a chicken...
He wasn’t a bitch...
A shrimp...
A pussy...
He wasn’t any of the names the big kids called him.
He would show David he wasn’t afraid of anything. He would show himself.
“Yeah, I’m sure,” he said.
“Good, now keep quiet,” David warned, opening the old trunk a second time. “And don’t spaz out, okay?”
Daniel took a deep breath. He was a diver descending into the depths of the ocean. An adventurer, pressing on further into an unexplored cave.
“Okay,” he said, and climbed, one foot before the other, in to the old trunk.
“Lay on your side, legs in,” David coached. “There you go, see?”
David was right. The fit was tight, but somehow it was enough. Daniel placed his free hand up on the lid. It was the last safeguard, the last protection against the darkness he knew would come all too soon. He didn’t want to let go, to take that plunge. The whole idea was wrong.
“David?” Daniel asked, eyes taking in the form of his older brother, his protector, his guardian. “Don’t
leave me.”
“Shh...” David said. A smile, a wink, and then darkness as he closed the lid on his brother.
At first, the shadow was soothing.
Daniel knew this part. He’d felt it before, hiding beneath blankets and beds, away from imaginary monsters at night and bullies during the daylight.
But soon, he knew, the darkness would give way to shades and sounds leaking in through the cracks. Soon, his eyes would find the narrow boundaries of the box. Soon, he would hear his heart racing, faster and faster, a wretched drum that would drown out that perfect clock in his head.
“David?”
Soon, the air would curdle, a mixture of sweat and cedar, and his tongue would swell and his throat would tighten.
“David...?”
Soon, he would find himself struggling against the edges of the shadows, the invisible boundaries of that personal universe, the extent of his existence in that cold darkness, that tomb.
“David!”
Soon, he would realize that there was nothing more frightening, nothing that shook him to the core of his being, nothing in ten short years of fear and abandonment, there was nothing worse than being alone in that infinite, unforgiving shade.
“DAVID!?”
How long had he been screaming? He didn’t know.
Had it been seconds, or hours, or days?
Time had stretched and distorted. He felt tears against his face and snot leaking from his nose but he couldn’t tell which direction they came from, which way was up, or which way was down. He was spinning, helpless in the darkness.
“DAVID PLEASE!”
How long had he been clawing at the edges of the shade? He didn’t know. His fingers were wet, a sharp pain buried in the tips, as if they had been torn across glass.
“LET... ME... OUT!”
How long had he been screaming, begging, pleading with the shadows? His words were little more than gravel coughed forth amid pure, utter, fear. This mistake, this horrible mistake... how long had be been trapped in it?
Forsaken - A Novel of Art, Evil, and Insanity Page 1