The Blake Soul

by I C Camilleri

  THE BLAKE SOUL

  by

  I.C. Camilleri

  First Edition

  Copyright 2012 I.C. Camilleri.

  Smashwords Edition

  All rights reserved.

  I. C. Camilleri has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work.

  Published in the United Kingdom. All rights reserved under International Copyright Law. Contents and/or cover may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the express written consent of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, save those clearly in the public domain, is purely coincidental.

  Dedicated

  To Mum and Dad for loving me.

  To Brian for being there.

  To Luke and Sarah for filling my heart with joy.

  To Josielle for her infectious enthusiasm.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  TITLE

  DEDICATION

  THE BLAKE SOUL

  Prologue

  Dreams

  Premonitions

  Confessions

  Guardian Angel

  The Library

  Arrivederci

  The Tall Dark-Haired Man

  Plan B

  Giving Destiny a Helping Hand

  The End Justifies the Means

  Coming Home

  Bleeding Wounds

  Ben

  Jealousy, Revenge, and Desolation

  Fair Warning

  Sphere of Control

  The Clap of Thunder

  Hanging by a Thread

  Accepting Mistakes and Moving On

  Watched

  The Black Notebook

  Impossible Decisions

  The Lull before the Storm

  Wise Solomon’s Choice

  Conflicting Emotions

  The White Cell

  Vindictive Twist of Fate

  Stopping History from Repeating Itself

  The Blake Curse

  THE BLAKE SOUL

  Prologue

  “... Don’t you even think of giving up, you can’t leave me, I will not let you leave me....” she cried as she fell across his bloodied chest.

  He looked at her face all twisted in agony. He reached out and touched her hair. He had always liked the feel of those soft curls slipping through his fingers. He tried to smile. He wanted to tell her that he loved her, that it was all right, she would move on without him and would someday find her happiness, but he could not find enough strength to say what was on his mind. His breathing was failing. The pain was unbearable.

  He had never seen this coming, but again this world was never meant to be his.

  He looked up at the cloudless blue sky as his life flashed before his eyes. He was grateful for every second of it. It was much more than he ever deserved. He was happy. He smiled. He let go of her hair and closed his eyes....

  Dreams

  She grimaced as she stepped on the escalator and ruminated over the dramatic changes in her life. She leaned on the handrail and sadly glanced up at the opposite escalator going down, and her eyes met the intense stare of a stranger. He looked at her with a puzzled expression, raw emotion on his face. He managed a dazzling smile as they drew up level but she lowered her gaze. She reached the top of the stairway and turned round. He was still looking at her, his dark eyes searching deep within her soul. He seemed to toy with the idea of going back up, but then he pulled his baseball cap further across his eyes, turned his back on her and was lost amongst the bookshelves on the lower floor.

  Maria Conti shrugged and switched her mind back to her sorry thoughts. Up until two months ago her life had been smooth and ripple-free. Everything she touched in her twenty-four years of existence turned to gold. She was blessed with beauty, brains, cunning and most importantly, a loving tight-knit family. She sailed through school life and effortlessly aced her medical degree from St Joseph’s College in Cambridge. Three years on she achieved what very few would achieve in a lifetime. Her relentless hard work and fierce ambition led to an important breakthrough in her cancer research project. And her good fortune extended beyond her career. She was engaged to her boss, Rob, the striking medical director of one of the most prestigious hospitals in the UK. She was in love and their lavish wedding preparations were in full swing.

  But this steady golden road made a very sharp U-turn when both her parents were killed in a tragic skiing accident. She was devastated, her only consolation being her elder brother Max, but he too moved on and returned to his life. She might have continued to struggle on had she not found out that the man she was about to marry in a month’s time was having a casual affair with one of her colleagues.

  Her world fell apart. Her one aim was to escape from it all, so she packed a small bag and took the first hop-on flight out of Gatwick Airport which happened to be Los Angeles. She was jet-lagged and emotionally drained with no hotel reservation. She left her small bag in one of the lockers at the coach station and headed off to the city centre. She would look for a place to stay later. At that moment all she needed was to find a bookstore and lose her painful thoughts inside the fantasy world of a good book.

  ****

  Josh looked around him as the familiar haunting fear engulfed him. Every fibre in his body rebelled against him being there but he had no choice, he had to endure it until his mind would drift out of his dreams and back to reality, back to his own bedroom.

  The light wind whispered in the dense trees overhead and the nearby fountain wept as the water painfully trickled down its sides. All his surroundings were sharp and vivid, and he could memorise every vein in every leaf, every crack in every cobbled stone in that winding path deep in the heart of that deserted country park. He had been to this same place plenty of times before in his boyhood nightmares. Those traumatic dreams had just faded away as he grew older, but over the past week they returned with a vengeance. Why haunt him now after more than two decades?

  Josh looked at the nearby bench beneath the large oak tree and the strange man was there again. The tall dark-haired man had never been present in any of his childhood dreams, but for the past week he had been there, watching silently, never speaking. He had that hazy ghostlike appearance just as Josh himself had in his dream, which was a sharp contrast with his crystal clear surroundings. It was as if both men did not belong to that vivid sharp picture, they were both invading a dimension in which they could never exist.

  The tall dark-haired man just stared at him. He always looked sad and restless but that day his face was really twisted in sheer agony. He looked like a desperate man as he silently begged Josh for help. But what could be causing him so much pain? Was he warning him of some imminent danger?

  Josh could feel an invisible bond binding him to this man and he was glad of his silent company. That park could get quite lonely at times. He knew that only too well when, as a child, he would roam about in his dreams and endure the tortured screams over and over again. But who was this man? Was he his unknown father? But apart from him being tall and dark-haired he had nothing else that even remotely resembled him.

  Josh walked over to the bench opposite the man and sat down. As he did so he touched the trunk of a nearby tree. He looked at his hand and was horrified to see it covered with bright red blood. That familiar sick feeling started to cloud his thoughts. His irrational and intense childhood fear of blood still haunted his adult life.

  “This is not real, this is not real,” he kept repeating to himself. He tried to refocus on his surroundings as he desperately wiped his hands on his white shirt. I
t was then that he saw drops of blood on the cobbled path. He followed the trail which ended in the undergrowth. Here the vegetation had been crushed, creating a new path. Someone had been dragged off into the dense forest beyond.

  A flock of birds flew up in the air as an agonized scream pierced the silence. Josh was immobilized, he wanted to help but he could not go down that path, that same path in the undergrowth through which he had raced down in his childhood dreams. The images he had seen in that nightmare were forever locked away and forgotten, they were just dreams, figments of one’s imagination and they had never come to life. He would not torment himself with make-believe images. He turned around and looked at the dark-haired man who was now crying bitterly into his hands. But Josh could not help him, he had been too late in this dream and he had done nothing to prevent those screams. But tomorrow he would be there on time...he had to be there way before five o’clock.

  Josh woke up with a start, sweat trickling down his forehead. He looked at the exquisite young actress sleeping beside him, her leg hooked around his and her hand possessively draped across his chest. She was the one-night stand he had picked up at the gala dinner the night before. In reality he had wished to kick her out of his bed after all activity ceased but he had been too tired to be insolent and ill-mannered. He had just rolled over to his side and slept. He scowled and roughly pushed her away as he ruminated over the recurring vivid dreams.

  He had been plagued by similar dreams all throughout his childhood, but he had only gone down the path in the undergrowth once. What he had seen must have petrified him for he had locked the images away and refused to remember them. Thereafter he stayed on the cobbled path and endured the chilling screams. He had eventually outgrown the disturbing nightmares. But why had they returned after all those years, why a week ago, and moreover, why was there the weird man in them now?

  The images never changed, the only variables were the presence of the tall dark-haired man, and himself, now a man instead of a boy. Otherwise it was the same large fountain in that particular country park, and the same bench partially obscured by the same large oak tree, and the same heartrending screams. But this time he got to know the time he was expected to be there, five o’clock in the afternoon, he had seen the man’s watch as he wept bitterly into his hands.

  The park was not the safest in the area where drug users found a cosy hideaway between the dense foliage. There had been reports of numerous thefts, rapes and even a murder in the last year alone. Nevertheless, Josh had patiently sat on that bench for the past two days, hoping to get an explanation for the return of these nightmares. But nothing happened and no dark-haired man showed up. Were these images the past or the future, or just figments of his imagination, and who was this man? Could he possibly be his father?

  Twenty-nine-year-old Josh Blake never managed to curb that angry boyhood frustration that surfaced every time he thought of his unknown father. His mother, Caris, was a successful Hollywood actress but the only thing she did for him was to bring him into the world and provide the means for his upbringing. They only met once a year on his birthday until he turned eighteen and, after that, even those painful yearly visits stopped.

  Those traumatic visits would savagely tear at his heart and the passage of time did nothing to prevent the wounds from bleeding painfully again and again. Caris used that day to constantly remind him of her terrible and biggest mistake, giving birth to him. He could still see that young boy sadly watching his mother as she gave him list after list as to why he was unworthy of her love. She never hit him or hurt him physically, but Josh would have preferred that to the mental abuse he was subjected to once a year. She often bluntly told him that she had wanted an abortion but her plans had been sadly thwarted by Julie, an English nurse.

  Julie had lost her husband and daughter in a car crash in the UK. She wanted to leave her painful memories behind and she immigrated to the States and started to work in a clinic where Caris was due to have her abortion. This kindly English nurse somehow persuaded his mother to go ahead with the pregnancy, and after he was born Julie cared for him lovingly and tried to replace his mother’s love with her own. Josh would have been happy with that but Caris made sure that he knew all about the painful facts of his origin. He was brought up brainwashed that he was never wanted and therefore unworthy of any love.

  His mother always insisted that she did not know or even care who his father was. There were so many possibilities that she did not even dare mention them. He believed her because he clearly remembered his childhood constantly tainted by the news of the wild scandals she created as a result of her insurmountable alcohol and drug addiction.

  So Josh was brought up by Julie in a luxurious villa provided by his mother and he never lacked any monetary needs. Not that he lacked any love either, for Julie doted on him and there was also Aunt May, Caris’ sister who was nothing like her sibling. May did not have her sister’s talents when it came to acting, but she was kind, gentle and understanding. She loved him almost as much as her own son Freddie who was only six months older than Josh. She lived not very far from his place with her husband Phil and son, in a similar villa of their own with acres upon acres of land.

  Josh spent every Sunday of his childhood there, playing with Freddie and Uncle Phil, but somehow those weekly visits would always depress him even more. Perhaps he saw what he was truly missing, caring parents. Uncle Phil, also an accomplished actor like his mother, always tried his best to step in his father’s shoes and he taught him everything a father would have, like riding a bike and playing football and basketball. He would attend his nephew’s parents’ evening with Julie and was always there on every prize day and school event. Of course he would have attended anyway because of his son Freddie but Josh could still remember him clapping loudly as he received his awards even though Freddie might not have had any.

  Josh would indeed wipe out all the achievement awards in his year group. He possessed a highly unique and incredible photographic memory, his brain assimilating and storing information with astounding speed and accuracy. He was reading books by the age of two, remembering every insignificant word in its correct sequence. This ability was unbeatable and he was soon resented for his success. His classmates called him ‘the freak’ and as he grew older he started to greatly tone down his achievements. As a boy he had this desperate need to be accepted and loved since he lacked both from his natural parents, and, having an unusually strange ability to remember every tiny detail on every page in all the books he had read, certainly would not help him integrate with others.

  However the other children easily picked on the fact that he was different. When his photographic memory faded in the background they quickly turned to his sorry family life. His filthy mother and unknown father was something he could never shy away from. Josh became an introvert as he preferred the company of a good book to that of jeering, spiteful children. He would often observe others from afar and he quickly picked up the art of interpreting body language. He was often referred to as that weird, sad bastard who never ever laughed. His cousin Freddie, always his opposite, always the extrovert, would occasionally look out for him, but he too seemed to go through frequent bouts of jealousy whenever Josh was chosen in a leading role in a school play or had won all the awards. After such an event Freddie would pick on the thing that would hurt him most. Josh could still hear the nine-year-old Freddie, “You’ve got no father and your mother wanted to kill you when you were just a few cells in her womb.” He had broken his nose for that.

  Josh hated with a passion everything Hollywood stood for and everyone was surprised when he announced that he wanted an acting career. Nonetheless, he seemed to have inherited his mother’s good looks and talents because at just twenty-nine he had already won two Oscars and starred in various blockbuster movies. His tall dark frame, perfectly chiselled features and piercing coal-black eyes turned all heads and he became one big heartthrob who everyone wanted to watch on big screen.

 
His scorn for all females fed by the hatred he felt for his mother gained him the reputation of a ruthless lover who, like a tornado, was not bothered with the amount of broken hearts he left in his wake. This was widely reported in all gossip magazines, but Josh didn’t care. He was handsome, successful and incredibly rich and he now had the upper hand. It was those same girls who had made fun of him when he was a boy who were now fighting for a piece of his heart. But his heart was frozen and could never belong to anyone. He used women and cast them aside without a second thought. He was now referred to as that arrogant, cold-hearted, silent and sad but irresistibly handsome and talented actor. He lived in his own mind, his own sanctuary, and no one was ever invited in.

  At this point in his life he should not have had that blinding obsession to discover the identity of his real father, but he could not shrug off that deep yearning. Perhaps his father did not even know that Caris had been pregnant. Perhaps he would have loved his son had he known about him. With this in mind he jumped off his bed and went to have an ice-cold shower. He would be gone by the time the girl in his bed woke up. Julie would have to kick her out and make sure she never called.

  He had this irrational urge to do exactly what the man in his dream had asked him to do.

  Premonitions

  It was past two o’clock in the afternoon when Josh finally parked his red Ferrari outside the run-down park and he could not help noticing how out of place it looked in that area. He wondered if it would still be there after an hour, but he didn’t care. He decided to walk the short distance to the city centre. He needed something to read to kill time whilst he waited for ‘his father’ to show up. He turned up his jacket collar and put on his baseball cap, hoping that those finishing touches would mislead people and somehow prevent the deluge of fans begging for autographs.