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This book is a work of fiction. Any incident, locales, places, businesses, characters, and names have either been created with the author's imagination or purely used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to an actual person, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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The Revelation
A Paranormal Crime Thriller
Thomas Ransom
CONTENTS
CONTENTS
About the Book
Dee ~ Chapter One
Amber ~ Chapter Two
Dee ~ Chapter Three
Amber ~ Chapter Four
Dee ~ Chapter Five
Amber ~ Chapter Six
Dee ~ Chapter Seven
Amber ~ Chapter Eight
Dee ~ Chapter Nine
Amber ~ Chapter Ten
The Calling (Book 3)
Books By Thomas Ransom
Staying In Touch with Tom
About the Book
Echo Creek Has Secrets...Dark Secrets
The Calling got the best of Roger. Now his wife Dee is doing the best she can without him to provide a normal life for her four children. But normal is far from what they got! The Callings are back!
Dee hears voices that want her to do horrible things. Things to the people of Echo Creek. Fighting to resist the impulses, Dee manages to ward off The Callings with the help of her four children, especially her eldest daughter, Amber.
Something about that house is not right
Amber takes it on herself to find out the history of that old house, and the reason for the callings. People are not who they appear to be in Echo Creek!
Who will The Calling go after next...
This is a thrill ride that will keep you on the edge of your seat!
Dee ~ Chapter One
It came for me too. The Calling. It came. A harrowing call, waking me from my slumber as my heart thudded loudly and rapidly like a jackhammer.
Kimberlee, Kimberlee. She steals from others. She takes from them. Kill her. Go now and kill her.
Shaking my head in fury and disbelief I woke up fighting against myself as an enormous pull on my energy field lifted me from my bed and yanked me into my kitchen. It was like being outside of my body and not being able to get back inside to control the movements.
Sweat dripped from my face as the energy established its hold and dragged my feet along the floorboards. I wriggled my arms and torso free contorting myself into bizarre shapes to pull out of it. Roger hadn’t been strong enough and my soul knew I sure as hell wasn’t a killer.
“No!” I screamed out loud, hoping my children would hear. “You won’t take me! You won’t take me! You cannot take me. Stop!”
Whirring sounds like a helicopter close overhead drove into my skull as my fingers curled up in resistance against the powerful field of energy.
“God help me. I pray, God please help me. I revoke you! I revoke your evil from this house. Roger, is that you?” I yelled as I heard the kids clambering out of their rooms as the pressure in my head expanded, making it feel as if it was going to explode. My ears felt like blood would burst from them any minute. The pressure was so great that I fell to my knees with tears rolling down my face.
I was sobbing in despair wearing my white nightgown when Amber dropped to the floor with me, holding my back and trying to get me to stand.
“Make it stop Amber! Make it stop,” I shrieked desperately as a confused look filled her face.
“Mom! Mom - look at me. Make what stop? What is it? What is it?” Cleo asked, not knowing any better than her sister what to do.
“The Calling. The Calling. I need you to remove all the sharp knives from the drawer. Robbie, help your brother do it. Robbie, go now and help your brother remove the knives.”
Shuddering, a light that only I could see shined in my eyes, blinding me as the voices got louder and louder.
I’m your husband, do as I say, and answer the call. Answer now. It is your duty. Go kill Kimberlee.
I shook my head vehemently. “No, no please,” I begged as I placed my hands on the floor. “Please. She doesn’t deserve it, no matter what she’s done. No matter what. Stop. Please.”
Go now. Go now the voice coaxed in a hoarse whisper.
Cleo started crying. She was the most vulnerable out of my children. Since the death of Roger, she’d been withdrawn and stayed in her room a lot. She was the one who clung to me the most. I wanted to protect my baby girl. Her brother Robbie, who was her twin, comforted her when she was upset, sometimes sleeping beside her to keep her safe. I heard him one night as she laid crying in bed over her deceased father, Roger.
“I know. I’m sorry he’s gone too, but he did bad things to people. He had to go away. Don’t worry Cleo, I'll protect you from the monsters in the dark.” He would hold her hand and they would fall asleep together.
It had been a year since the death of my husband at the hands of the Echo Creek police. His hand had killed many and there was a hefty price for every sin.
“Is it Dad, Mom? Is it Dad? Is it him?” Amber asked, shaking me as I fought against her moving to the kitchen.
Remove her. She is blocking you. Kill. Your job is to kill Kimberlee for she has sinned... Go now. Screeching sounds rang through both my ears in weird succession as one sound entered, another penetrated the other ear.
I sunk to the floor, my hands trying to grasp the slick surface as I laid my head on the timber floorboards.
“No, no, no, Roger. Leave now. It’s over. I can’t kill.” I wasn’t particularly religious, but I remembered prayers from church when I was a kid.
“I revoke you. I revoke you. Leave me alone. Go now. Leave this house now.”
Lights flickered on and off as I felt Amber’s hand on my back.
“Holy crap Mom,” Amber called out as her face peered up at the ceiling and I placed my hands in the prayer position.
“Whoa! This is so cool. It’s like a light show. I can’t believe it,” Dusty remarked as the lightbulb danced back and forth. Fervently, I prayed for absolution, for the energy to stop. Everything blurred as I heard the kids yelling and windows started to bang open and closed. Fear wrapped itself around me as I felt every cell in my body respond. I kept my eyes shut tight as I rocked back and forth on my knees praying.
After an hour of prayer, the light stabilized, and the voices left. I’d felt like I’d gone into a trance with all the chaos around me, not knowing if it would work. I waited for several minutes hoping the end was near.
Amber tapped my shoulder. “Mom, Mom. It’s stopped, it's okay now. It’s alright. You can get up.” As my body calmed down, I opened my eyes, scared of the repercussions, fearing the worst. My children surrounded me in a circle saying a prayer over me as I cried some more and thanked them.
“Thank you, babies. Thank you so much. Thank you.” All of them had their eyes closed and were chanting the same prayer I’d been reciting for the last hour.
“We were helping you, Mom. Did you feel us?” Cleo inquired. I was so overwhelmed I didn’t know what to say.
“I did. I felt it. The voices have stopped. Thank you, my babies. I’m so grateful,” I finally managed as Cleo ran inside the circle, hugging me tight.
“Mom, we gotta figure out what this is. We gotta get it out of here,” Amber declared fie
rcely.
I rose, my body wracked with pain from staying locked in the same position with my muscles clenched. “No, we should leave. I want us to leave Echo Creek.”
“No Mom, we have to stand and fight.”
Her impassioned plea was lost on me. I wanted out.
She was adamant, though. “I’m not leaving, I have friends here and we can’t let this energy win. We have to do something to fight back.”
Shattered from the call, my limbs barely allowed me to raise myself up off the creaky floor. I craned my neck to look up to the low-hanging ceiling light that swung from side to side.
Bringing the children closer I gathered them up into my arms. “My babies, is everyone okay? Are you okay? I’m so sorry. Your father, the pull, there’s something wrong with this house,” I said, breathlessly.
Amber ran over to the sink and grabbed a glass of water and handed it to me.
“That’s what I think. I want to find out who lived in this house before. Maybe it’ll give us some clues. What if the next person comes and the same thing happens to them? We have to work it out, Mom. We can do it. You stopped it with the prayer. If you can stop it with prayer, then we can stop it.”
“You think we can? I don’t want us living here if it’s going to cost us our lives.”
Robbie, whose hair was long and overdue for a haircut innocently blinked at me. “I threw all the knives in the trash Mom. Just like you said.”
Dusty corrected him. “I wrapped them up and put them in a plastic bag in the trash in case you want to dig them out again. That was intense. What’s up with Dad? Do you think he’s haunting us now? I used to think of him before, but I dunno… I feel weird, he’s fading now.”
Picking up Dusty’s fingers I gripped his hand. “Your father will always be a part of you. You have his DNA running through your veins. He was a good man; he was just taken over by this...this energy. Trust me, he loved you with all his heart. You have to know that.”
“I miss him, Mom. I know what he did was bad, but I miss him. I really do.” Dusty spoke sadly as his hair hung over his forehead. He’d turned into the man of the house, and he was doing a fantastic job.
“I know you do, but we’ll get through this as a family. I promise you. I don’t know what your father heard, but it’s real. There’s a sound and some sort of pull that tells me-” I stopped as I gazed at Cleo’s bright, big eyes waiting to continue with the next sentence. “Cleo, cover your ears,” I announced.
“Mom, why can’t I hear?”
“You just can’t.” I pushed her hands up to her ears, I don’t know why I didn’t tell Robbie to do that, but I didn’t.
Cleo covered her ears as I circled back to what I was saying. “The voices. The Calling, it tells me to kill. To hurt people, it’s the same voice your father responded to,” I relayed to them in a hushed, frazzled tone.
“What? It’s telling you to kill people? I’m going to the library tomorrow. I gotta find out about who lived here. This is sick.” Amber looked up at the ceiling again and the light had stopped swinging. “There’s gotta be a way out of this…”
Amber ~ Chapter Two
Technically I was eighteen in one month and if I wanted to leave Echo Creek, I could. I vowed when I was legal, I would go. I had my license and I’d just about saved enough for the car I wanted. It was a little blue bomb, but whatever - at least I could have some freedom and ride out of this hellish town when I wanted to get away. The funny thing was; that was my plan all along and then the place had to go and grow on me. Go figure!”
Things got strange after Dad was shot. Everybody in town either ignored us and called us ‘the weird family’ or gave this fake pseudo kind of sympathy, which I hated. I wish they’d just cross the road and act like they never knew us. That was better for me rather than their puppy dog looks and ‘blessings.’
“So sorry about what happened to your father.”
“Time heals all wounds, pet.”
If I had to hear that one more time I was going to throw up in my mouth. The one person who didn’t treat me with kid gloves was the owner of the bookstore I worked at. Harry treated me like a normal everyday person after the dad died.
“Ah, crap happens, doesn’t it? Your father’s not gone, he’s in a better place. So, we drink to Roger!” He lifted his glass of whiskey as we drank to Dad, and he poured himself another drink.
Harry was the oddball in town, but people accepted him for his eccentric ways. He wore this dusty brown jacket with an old gray vest, he barely had any hair left and he walked with a cane. I liked him instantly. He had so many books, and when I visited his bookstore for the first time, he looked disheveled and overwhelmed.
“Looks like you could use some help around here. Would I be right?” I liked some books, but not all. It was more that the bookstore possessed something special about it, and I liked the look of Harry.
“Eh? You want to help me? That’s a first, what on earth would a young girl like you want working next to me?”
“The offer’s not going to stay long, so you’re either in or you’re out.” I brought my nails up to my face. Half of them were chipped and needed redoing.
“Ah, a feisty one. Alright then, I’ll take you up on your offer. How about you start next week? I have plenty for you to do. I can’t pay you much, but I will feed ya. I’ve got a year's worth of vouchers from the Larry Pikes - the burger joint down the road. I did him a big favor a while back and he gave me the vouchers.”
“Do they have thick shakes there?” I loved shakes in whatever flavor they came in.
“They do indeed, young lady. Want the job?”
I reached out my hand with a smile. “Done deal”
Harry would know who lived in the house. He would know the history of it. I’d been working there for a few months, and we were getting along like an old married couple. Not that I personally had any clues about that, nor did I want to, especially if the person I married turned out to be a bonafide serial killer like my father.
When my father showed up and the lights started flickering it was time for me to step up and help my mother. For selfish reasons I wanted my mother around. HerH ending up in prison, or dead, was not an option. My father was not going to get the better of any of us. The night he showed himself to us, what Mom described as ‘The Calling’, was the night I committed to finding out what the hell was going on. None of us slept a wink.
Dusty, Cleo, and Robbie all crammed in the bed together huddling next to one another for comfort and security. The next morning, we woke up looking like the walking dead ourselves. Everyone was tired and freaked out of their skulls, including me. I stayed with Mom in her bedroom and slept on the floor. One; so she could get some sleep, and two; so I could keep watch in case she decided to sleepwalk to the kitchen.
We all made it through the first part of the day without falling apart. Dusty brought in the large wicker basket of apples from the orchard we had out back.
“You’ve got a nice bunch there. You were only out there for an hour. You must have been picking quick,” I observed.
Dusty ran a hand through his floppy brown fringe. “Trying to keep my hands busy. You think you know what’s going on?” He spoke in a low whisper because my 12-year-old brother and sister were coming in behind him. I guessed he was attempting to save them from the pain.
“I don’t know crap,” I replied as I picked one of the crisper-looking apples out of the basket and bit into it. “All I know is there is some spooky shit going on in this house. I plan to find out what it’s all about. I mean, even if Dad was a maniac and had all those things happen to him in childhood, he never ever put his hands on anybody. Then we get here, and he starts stabbing people to death and slicing them up?”
Dusty put a finger to my mouth as I chomped. “Keep your voice down, the twins are coming in.”
“Dusty, they deserve to know too. You can’t keep them in the dark. Our father was a serial killer.”
I was due at work
that afternoon and I told my mother so. “Hey mom, I’m headed into the bookstore this afternoon. I'm going to ask Harry about the house. See if he knows anything. I betcha he does. He’s lived here long enough.”
“That’s a good idea. I wanna know what he has to say. I could use the help. It’s not like I can go to the police. They already think I’m some sort of loony.” She looked so downhearted. A typhoon of fury swirled in the pit of my stomach.
Who does my father think he is? He kills all these people and now he wants to haunt his own family?
“Okay, great. Maybe you can take me down there now so I can get a jump start.”
“Well alright, if, you’re sure.” My mother seemed to lose her confidence at times, but the way she dropped to her knees in prayer was admirable. She saved all our lives from ‘The Calling.’
She unhooked the keys on the rack, and we traveled the short distance into town, stopping at the almost hidden bookstore. The bookstore appeared to be almost invisible as its color blended in almost as if it wasn’t there. People often said something about it.
“I almost didn’t know you were here. It’s hard to find you.”
With which Harry would always reply, “You can find me sure enough if you use the two eyes in your noggin.” Now that expression didn’t go over well with some out-of-towners, but with others, they got a kick out of it.
I got out of the car waving goodbye to Mom. I hated to leave her in a time like this, but it was a risk I was willing to take. I had to know.
With my hands in my pockets, I smiled at Harry as he looked up from his newspaper.
“Hey, Harry. How are you?”
“You’re early, that’s good. I have quite a lot of sorting through the Britannica Encyclopedias to do. All of them have to be put back in their rightful place.”
“I can start on them, but can I talk to you at the same time?”
The Revelation (A Paranormal Crime Thriller Book 2) Page 1