Storm Taken: A Supernatural Thriller

by William Michael Davidson

  “For the last time, I didn’t take your knife,” Jessie said. “And if I did want a knife, I wouldn’t take it from some slimy, third-rate biker, like yourself. I’d─”

  “What’d you say?” Klutch asked.

  “─rather go down to Costco and buy a clean knife because─”

  “Are you insulting me?” Klutch said, his eyebrows furrowing, although one of his eyebrows was missing that chunk.

  “─I wouldn’t want to put my hands on your nasty─”

  Several people advanced to separate them. A group of men pulled them apart, and after much cursing and chaos, Klutch returned to his bike, where he turned around and yelled back at the crowd.

  “I’ve been told there’s a bunch of friendly people here on this island,” Klutch yelled. At this point, I realized Klutch was drunk. “Tonight, all you guys are gonna go back to your nice homes on the water and drink your nice little wine, but let me tell you something. When it comes down to it, you all are a bunch of thieves like that guy over there. You ain’t no different than where I come from. Your world starts to fall apart, you all would just eat each other alive like anyone else. You need people like me, you hear that? You need me! You celebrate your freedom because people like me gave it to you! You hear that?”

  He climbed on his bike, started it up, and after a ceremonial revving of his engine and giving nasty looks to the entire community he’d insulted, he rode off into the darkness and disappeared like the leather-clad cacophonous cockroach that he was. It took awhile for everyone to settle down, and many people, including myself, advanced toward Jesse to pat him on the back and encourage him.

  Even Marsha Walker marched forward in her muumuu and went on and on about what a horrible, disgusting, and appalling thing that was to witness. “Devil worshipper!” she said in full dramatic flair. “Just like that neighbor across the way! Devil worshippers! They probably get together and kill cats at midnight!”

  Everyone settled down, and not long after that, the last bit of sunlight evaporated, and as the first sounds of thunder began in the distance, the fireworks commenced. Owen found Candice, and they were at the fountain, watching the fireworks show alone. Or making out. Who knew? We watched the show and sipped our wine while the heavens burst forth right above the waters of Alamitos Bay. Toby was the most impressed, of course. It made me reflect a bit, to be honest. I suppose most fireworks displays lose some of their luster as people grow older, but watching him, rapt with attention as blue, red, and yellow flower-like explosions blossomed in the sky, made me aware of how old I really was. There was still wonder in his eyes, still bedazzlement.

  Maybe that saying I’d heard about writers always creating stories to recapture their youth was true after all, because I’m pretty sure that at my age the only time I looked even remotely like my son at that moment was in those early hours in front of the computer. At those times, the paper is my moonlit sky. My words are the fireworks that I control at will.

  By the time the grand finale came and the last nighttime wonders had dripped down like sparkling paint in the sky, it was time to head home. Almost everyone had the same idea we had. People hastily gathered their chairs and their blankets and their empty bottles of wine and began the trek home.

  Another storm was about to hit. The wind picked up, and we could see, in the distance, the sizzling of lightning. It almost seemed as if Mother Nature was sending in a fireworks show of her own, as if she was whispering: You think you guys can put on a fireworks show? Let me show you real magic. I’ll give you a show to remember.

  Even at that point, this storm felt like it was going to be bigger than the two previous nights. The air felt more humid than it had been, the thunder was louder at this distance, and electrical light strobed through the celestial expanse of broken, gray clouds that moved toward us.

  Owen had caught up with us. The Paisleys, my wife, and sons, ran ahead of me in hopes of beating the storm; a very slight drizzle had begun to fall and they wanted to make it inside before it became a downpour. I ran behind, towing the cooler behind me. If I ran too fast, the wheeled cooler lost balance and tipped over, so I was forced to jog at a moderate speed.

  I was only a few blocks from home and the drizzle was growing ever so slightly, when I noticed a shadowy figure also running; this person ran along a side street and into one of the alleys behind the houses. I only caught a momentary glance, but the runner was wearing dark clothing and a backpack. I wasn’t sure if it was my own self-fueled paranoia at that point, but even though I had only gotten a quick, momentary glance of the person, I was pretty convinced it looked like Drake.

  Leaving my cooler on the sidewalk, I jogged over to the back alley to see for myself. The runner had stopped halfway down the alley. He was on his knees, rummaging through his backpack. It was dark behind the houses. Away from the streetlight and with the moon cloaked in cloud cover, it was difficult to make out much of anything. But there was enough light for me to see that this was, in fact, Drake. I had no idea why he had stopped to kneel down in the middle of an alley to fish through his backpack.

  I began to walk toward him. I had to know what he was doing.

  He heard me, and like a thief caught in the act, threw his backpack over his shoulder, turned around, and bolted through the alley with ferocity. I yelled for him to stop. I had no idea why I yelled and what I would have said to him if he actually had obeyed my request, but it seemed like the right thing to do. Only men who are guilty of something take off running like that. I was pretty sure he hadn’t seen who I was, and to be honest, I’m not even convinced he would recognize me if he had.

  I stopped when I reached the spot where he had been kneeling. I didn’t try to pursue him on foot, and the reasons were simple. I would never catch him. I’ve never been much of a runner and judging by the speed he had bolted away, it would have been a completely futile effort. Secondly, I wasn’t even sure what he had done wrong. As far as I knew, there was no crime in kneeling in an alley and looking through your backpack.

  I stood for a moment in the alley, feeling my hair dampen as the rain came down, and just as I was about to turn around and head back to my abandoned cooler, I noticed something on the ground: a spiral notebook. I bent down and picked it up but knew this wasn’t the time and place to look through it. I tucked it under my jacket to keep it dry from the rain and went back to my cooler.

  By the time I got home, the drizzle had turned into a downpour. The Paisleys had already gone inside their home, and my family had gone indoors as well.

  I ran up to the front door of my house with the cooler, but before I went inside, I took the notebook out of my jacket. Just outside the front entrance and sheltered from the rain, I flipped through it.

  It was mostly blank. Only a couple pages had been written on. One page appeared to be a hand-sketched map of the park we had just left. I could see where Drake had drawn in the fountain and indicated the four cardinal directions with a large N, S, E, and W and arrows at the top of the map. A series of dashes went along the perimeter of the park and toward the fountain and then off the page. What did the dashes mean? I assumed the dashes represented some kind of path or trail, but I had no idea what it alluded to. Was this the path that Drake had walked this night while watching the fireworks? It was very odd.

  Below the map, Drake had written a few notes:

  - down Toledo

  - into D

  - to B

  - Climax!!!

  I looked it over for a few minutes to make sure I was reading correctly. Down Toledo? Into D? To B? Climax!!! I had no idea what I was reading, why Drake would have this with him, or what exactly he was doing, but, as I look back, I wonder if it was something else in the air that really unnerved me that night.

  The storm hit particularly hard. I awoke several times to deafening thunder. The rain sounded angry against the roof shingles and windows, a great watery judgment.

  But, again, I think I didn’t sleep well because there was something mor
e in the air that night. By the following day, I became aware that something terrible was at work, something far beyond anything I had imagined.

  I don’t think I was the only one to realize this either. Now, as I look back, it all makes sense. Once I learned more and put together other people’s stories, it was clear. We should have seen it coming.

  I woke up the following morning to rainless skies.

  The real storm—I would realize later—was about to begin.

  Chapter Ten

  Samantha woke up at her usual time at five-thirty for yoga. She was taking classes at a little studio on Second Street, Cardio Plus, and had enjoyed the last two months with her trainer, Sandy, a blonde woman who did yoga and weights with militant passion. She certainly had the body of someone who had made yoga her religion and was quite a good trainer. Samantha had already seen and felt the results these last couple months.

  She put on her workout clothes and grabbed a protein bar out of the refrigerator. She sat down at the bare dining room table, drank her bottled water, nibbled on her bar, and thought of the bouquet of flowers that had been there before Eddie had shown up. The table looked so empty now. When Eddie had left after her advance a couple days ago, she spent nearly an hour in the bathroom in front of the mirror, crying and yelling at herself.

  “Why did you have to marry a man who’s gone half the time?” she had said accusingly at her reflection. With tears streaming down her cheeks and her mascara blemished, she thought she looked like some kind of over-aged Goth wannabe. She couldn’t remember how long she remained in the bathroom, sobbing, grieving. She felt so foolish because she’d misread Eddie’s motives. Why else did a man invite himself into a woman’s bedroom? She was completely mortified by his kind yet firm rejection of her.

  Or had it been that firm? There seemed to be some kind of spark, some kind of attraction beneath it all.

  By the time she had washed the tears and the mascara from her face and left the bathroom, Samantha wasn’t sure if she would ever look Eddie Dees in the eyes again; she had made too much of a fool of herself. That wasn’t a mistake she was going to make again, and she would avoid him at all costs.

  But that was before she had gone downstairs the following morning, before she had noticed the missing bouquet of flowers.

  She had stood beside the table, wondering. She asked herself the same question over and over again: Was it possible she had thrown them away without remembering doing it? But no matter how many times she asked herself that question, the answer was self-evident: No. The flowers had clearly been there when Eddie arrived. She had even explained what they were and who they were from.

  She sat at the bare table that morning, contemplating the mystery of the missing flowers for a long while, when the answer occurred to her: Eddie took them. No one else had been in the house except for him, and the only logical explanation was that he had taken them as he left that night, right as she was making her way to the bathroom for an intense grief session.

  But the more serious question remained: Why did he take the flowers?

  She spent some time thinking about it, and a possible answer swept over her like a crisp, spring breeze. He was giving her a message, a sign. By taking the flowers, he was, in actuality, giving her another message entirely. You don’t have to settle for a husband who is gone half the time, he was trying to convey to her. You’re worth more than that. You can get rid of these. They’ll be replaced with something better. Something fresher. Something closer. Hadn’t she told him that? She wanted the flowers to disappear and a man to take their place?

  “Yes, I’m worth more than that,” she muttered to herself while contemplating how barren the table looked. As time passed, and by slow degrees, she convinced herself that Eddie Dees was trying to tell her something by getting rid of the flowers that she herself had complained to him about when he arrived.

  When she saw him yesterday at the fireworks show, she had whispered to him, “I noticed.”

  And she’d seen the look on his face. He knew that she knew. It was a look of understanding. Of acknowledgement. There was a promise in it.

  Yes, I think he wants me, she thought. Oh, to be wanted again! To be wanted in a way that made the little hairs on the back of her neck prickle! He would come to her, certainly, again. Who knew what the excuse would be this time. Maybe he’d want to take another peek out her window, or maybe he’d conjure up some other explanation. And this time, perhaps, he wouldn’t chicken out. Because as these newfound epiphanies crystallized in her mind, that was the reason for Eddie’s hasty refusal and exit that night: He’d gotten cold feet. Understandable, of course. Maybe he had never done anything behind his wife’s back before.

  But he would come to her again, and they would make love. It would be passionate. It would make up for her husband’s absence and his lukewarm appreciation of her when he was home. It would rejuvenate her and she would feel young—truly young—for the first time in what was beginning to feel like eons.

  I deserve this, she kept thinking. I deserve this.

  That morning, July 4th, she was in a hurry to get going. Happy that her instructor was still doing one morning class on the Fourth, Samantha was looking forward to guilt-free margaritas and chips and guacamole that afternoon. She finished her water and threw away the wrapper for her protein bar. Grabbing her keys and her gym bag, she hurried out the front door. The gym was just a short walk. No need to pull the Mercedes out of the garage.

  Sam was only a couple feet out of the door when she noticed something else missing. It had been there last night when she had raced home from the fireworks show to beat the rain. Or, at least, she thought it had been there. The engraved garden stone, the one that read “John & Samantha,” was gone. They’d put it there years ago, and there it had remained, right in the garden alongside the winding path to the front door. She looked at the brown, flattened earth where the stone should have been and wondered again.

  “Maybe he came over here last night and took it,” she whispered.

  Her whole body warmed and tingled with pleasure.

  It was another sign, she thought. Another message, to say that “John & Samantha” were a thing of the past. Just as new grass and flowers would grow to cover that barren spot created by the stone’s resting place, so would Eddie, like a vine, wrap himself around her and pull her into a new palatial garden. Her heart fluttered with adolescent excitement.

  “I think he wants me,” she said giddily, and as she raced to yoga class that morning, she already wondered what secret message he would send next.

  Or maybe there wouldn’t be any other messages; maybe he would just come to her in the night, to her bedroom, and take away the cold loneliness that haunted that room.

  Maybe it will be tonight, she thought hopefully as she jumped across puddles on her way to the gym. Maybe any moment.

  Chapter Eleven

  After nearly two hours of turning her house upside-down, Marsha Walker began to wonder if she was developing an early case of dementia.

  She had come home after the fireworks show on July 3rd, and like most others, barely beat the torrential downpour. She spent that night looking over her short story, “Bedazzled,” and told herself that she was finally ready to hand it over to her neighbor, Eddie Dees. She had been so nervous. He was a real writer, after all, and maybe he wouldn’t like it. That had occurred to her, and she’d even lost a little sleep over it.

  “I know I left it right here,” Marsha said for what felt like the millionth time that morning. She was standing beside the little breakfast table in the kitchen, and this whole thing wasn’t making any sense. She closed her eyes and replayed the prior evening in her mind over and over again: She had read through all twenty-one pages of the story, sipped her hot chocolate, ate two bowls of caramel crunch ice cream, and had gone to bed with the manuscript lying right there on the table.

  “Right there!”She knew she had been a little out of sync these last few days and a bit absentminded. Sh
e attributed some of it to menopause. She’d had her share of hot flashes, incontinence, and mood changes. Dr. Grissom said those things would happen. Usually, it was more of a blue, dreary feeling she experienced, and she longed for nothing more than to crawl on the couch and sleep away half the day. She’d kept it hidden from most, she thought, but when alone and inside her home, an oppressive fatigue sometimes swept over her. She was still taking the same anxiety medication she’d been taking for the last ten years, but she wondered if, considering the menopause, she should talk to her doctor again about changing the dosage.

  The other day, she’d felt foolish marching over to borrow some brown sugar from the Dees because she had seen some brown sugar in her cupboard just the day before that. It’d been right there in the pantry beside the tub of sugar. She had specifically made a list of things she needed at the store and had clearly checked off that item when she saw it there.

  But if that frustrated her, this was even more ridiculous and upsetting. She sat down at the breakfast table in the same spot she had spent the prior evening, devouring words and ice cream, and decided it was time to make a call to her doctor. If the manuscript wasn’t where she remembered leaving it, then she simply must have put it somewhere and completely forgotten. Something about that terrified her. If she couldn’t even remember what she did the night before, if she was that “out of it,” then it was definitely time to call the doctor, because maybe this whole menopause situation was taking away more than just her biological ability to bear children. Maybe it was taking her memory along with it.

  She noticed the familiar burning in the face just as she stood up to make breakfast. She imagined someone holding a heat lamp to her forehead. The warm sensation spread down to her waist, and a thin layer of sweat, almost instantly, percolated to the surface of her skin. She fanned herself briskly with her hand, though it didn’t help much. She knew how these flashes came and went. She waited until the warm sensations subsided, then went to the kitchen sink and splashed cold water on her face.