Awoken
Timothy Miller
Copyright © 2013 by Timothy Miller
Sale of the paperback edition of this book without its cover is unauthorized.
Spencer Hill Press
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
Contact: Spencer Hill Press, PO Box 247, Contoocook, NH 03229, USA
Please visit our website at www.spencerhillpress.com
First Edition: August 2013.
Timothy Miller
Awoken: a novel / by Timothy Miller – 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary:
Fourteen-year-old boy discovers elemental powers and is caught in a war between frightening dollmen and a more frightening corporation that would use his powers to redefine “human.”
The author acknowledges the copyrighted or trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this fiction:
Bambi, Criss Angel Mindfreak, Formica, Frisbee, Girl Scouts of America, Harry Potter, Humane Society, Krazy Glue, Lord of the Rings, Sleeping Beauty, Supernatural
Cover design by Lisa Amowitz
Interior layout by Marie Romero
ISBN 978-1-937053-53-6 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-937053-54-3 (e-book)
Printed in the United States of America
For Zenoba, who knew the way home. For my children, and all my nieces and nephews. And especially for Breigh, who helped me rediscover the Dollmen.
1
Night Approaches
Time was running out for fourteen-year-old Michael Stevens. He could feel it in his bones. Night was closing in, as unstoppable as the changing tide, as uncaring as the seasons.
They’d be coming soon.
He leaned his palms against the large bay window. Across the street, the setting sun brushed Mrs. Finche’s roof. A shaft of light reflected from her weathervane, turning his fingers a translucent pink against the glass. The faint silhouettes of small bones appeared beneath his fingernails. He stared at the skeletal fingertips and licked his lips. Death was coming.
“I’ll have to be very quick.”
“Did you say something, Michael?”
Michael jerked his hand from the glass. “Just talking to myself, Mrs. Wiffle.”
The portly woman seated on a tattered green couch in the center of the room clucked her tongue in mock annoyance. “Call me Barbara, dear.”
“Sorry, Mrs. Wif…I mean, Barbara. I was daydreaming.”
As was her habit before bed, Barbara wore her favorite fuzzy purple bathrobe, a shaggy tent-like garment large enough to cover a small automobile. Michael normally loved talking to Barbara when she wore the robe. It was as if he were having a conversation with a talking, purple bear.
Barbara smiled, pushing deep dimples into her cherubic cheeks. “Well, don’t be too long about it. No school doesn’t mean you can stay up all night. You’ll need to get to bed soon.”
Michael squashed a flare of annoyance. Barbara wasn’t trying to nag, but he needed no reminding of the hour, not tonight. “I’ll head up in a minute, Mrs. Wiffle.”
“Barbara, dear.”
“Sorry.”
A discontented snort drew Michael’s attention to the occupant of a navy-blue armchair in the corner, a skinny man in red and white pajamas holding a worn paperback.
“Talking to himself,” Mr. Wiffle muttered, frowning down at his book. “No friends, doesn’t like sports—not healthy, if you ask me.”
“You leave him be, Karl,” Barbara retorted. “Michael’s only been here two weeks. Give him some time.”
Michael grimaced. Mr. Wiffle’s comments didn’t particularly bother him. He’d been a ward of the state of Michigan for eleven years, since his parents had died. Compared to some foster dads, Karl was a soft-spoken creampuff. What did irritate him was the Wiffles’ habit of speaking as if he weren’t in the room.
“Two weeks,” Karl said. “Has he attended one sporting event or party? It’s not healthy, I tell you.”
“He needs time to adjust.”
“Time?” Karl threw up his hands. “Yesterday was the last day of school. How is he supposed to make friends now?”
Michael rolled his eyes. The same old complaints had dogged him for years. Why didn’t he have friends? Why didn’t he sign up for sports? When was he going to start adapting to his new home? He had learned to ignore them, mostly. Tonight, however, the carping grated on him like car keys on a mirror.
“Mark invited me to the park tomorrow,” he blurted. “We’re going to play football with some of his friends.”
The Wiffles looked at him as if surprised to find him still in the room. After a moment, Barbara smiled. “You see, Karl? He’s making friends already.”
Her enthusiasm left a sour taste in Michael’s mouth. He regretted the lie, but he had enough to worry about without their bickering chipping at his frayed nerves. Like so many others, the Wiffles expected him to behave in a certain way. They wanted him to hang out with other kids, go to the movies, or join the wrestling team. But he’d had enough of making new friends, of tying himself to fresh places and people only to be dragged to a new town every three or four years. He had made an exception in Diggs’s case, but he doubted revealing his friendship with the old vagrant would put his foster parents at ease.
“About time, Mike,” Karl grumbled. “Football’s a man’s game.”
“It’s also a rough game,” Barbara warned. “Be careful tomorrow, Michael. Don’t get hurt.”
“I will,” Michael promised.
Barbara the worrier. He only wished he could tell her his secret without having her send him to the nearest mental ward.
The sun dipped low behind Mrs. Finche’s roof, the orb’s rays turning a forbidding red as the night widened its hold. Isolation settled on Michael like a heavy cloak. Why was this happening? The Wiffles would never believe him. He had no one.
He should have stayed in bed.
He bit down on his lip and fought back his tears. Too late for “should haves.” He had to stick to the plan. Stick to the plan, and hope he was alive come morning.
Yep. He should have stayed in bed.
2
The Window (The Previous Night)
Michael lay in his bed, reading a Morbius, the Living Vampire comic beneath the sheets. Propped up by strategically placed pillows, the sheets had become a makeshift tent that perfectly muted the glow of his flashlight. It was also stuffy, so he pulled back the sheets to get some fresh air.
Today had been hot and sticky, making the last day of school drag on almost unbearably.
Julie Schmidt, a girl from his class who stared at him too often with her smoky brown eyes, had invited him and a handful of others to a swim party after school. He had declined. The offer was tempting, but the party was to be held at the rock quarry, an abandoned cavity of solid granite fed by underground springs. Once he got in all that rock, the music would start and…
“All kinds of awkward,” he said aloud.
He’d heard the music of the rock for as long as he could remember, like a small bee buzzing in the back of his mind. Mostly, he ignored the music. But at age seven, his second grade class had gone on a field trip to a cave filled with crystals. The moment he’d stepped inside the cavern, the music had become so loud he’d blacked out. His foster parents at the time had reacted as if Michael had been diagnosed with leprosy. A week later, he was living in a new foster home.
Now, he avoided large stone deposits. The swim
party might have been fun, but waking up at the bottom of the quarry would have ruined the afternoon.
He breathed in the night air, welcoming the cool tang on his tongue. A breeze had sprung up after sunset, and it flowed through his open window to chase away the lingering heat. Cooler and more comfortable, he lifted his comic.
Clang!
The noise was tinny and startlingly loud. Michael jerked, dropping the comic. The sound had come from the window.
“The boogeyman, I presume,” he joked.
Goosebumps washed up his arms. Great. Now he would never get back to sleep without first finding out what had caused the noise. He slipped out of bed and tiptoed to the window to investigate.
The back yard was not nearly as dark as he expected. The bright half-moon cast its silvery radiance on the ancient oak outside his window, covering the lawn with a hundred-armed silhouette that clawed at the detached garage with crooked, black fingers. Next to the garage, the garbage stood lined up in three grey trashcans. Tomorrow morning, Karl would carry the cans to the curb to await a Flintville garbage truck. Later in the afternoon, Michael’s job would be to return the emptied containers to the garage.
“In just a week, we get to do it all over again. Behold, we hardy men who fight for cleanliness, hygiene, and the trash-free way.”
He chuckled, and noticed a trashcan lid on the grass. The metal lid could be responsible for the clanging noise. But what had dislodged it?
As if in answer, a black cat leapt out of the darkness to land atop the opened can. The animal sniffed at the trash, pawing at the plastic bag.
Michael winced. So a hungry cat, and not the boogeyman. That was a relief, but Karl was going to pitch a fit when he found garbage scattered across the driveway in the morning. He should wake Karl, or at least try to scare the scavenger away.
Still, he wasn’t supposed to be up this late in the first place. If he woke up the Wiffles, he’d have some explaining to do. He leaned against the window frame and shrugged. A little spilled trash never hurt anyone.
“Enjoy your supper, Frisky. My lips are sealed.”
After a few minutes sniffing the bag, the cat abandoned the trash and hopped down from the can. Back on the ground, the feline made its way toward the deck behind the house.
“Oh, come on. Barbara’s meatloaf isn’t that bad.”
Raised about a foot above the lawn, the deck was directly beneath Michael’s window. Bereft of furniture or food, what had gained the cat’s interest remained a mystery, unless the animal had spotted a chipmunk, or a mouse.
“I don’t blame you. If I had to choose between eating leftover meatloaf or a raw chipmunk, I’d go for the fresh rodent, too.”
The cat froze mid-step, staring up at Michael’s window.
Michael stayed very still, hoping he hadn’t spooked the stray. The cat wasn’t exactly the nature channel, but watching the animal was more stimulating than reading a vampire comic for the third time.
Motionless as an Egyptian statue, the cat stared up at him, eyes glimmering strangely in the moonlight.
An uncomfortable feeling came over Michael. Something wasn’t right. A discordant note buzzed in his head, both like and unlike the quiet music of rock and stone. Before he realized what he was doing, he took a step back from the window. Abruptly, the cat looked away and resumed the interrupted hunt. The wrongness in the air vanished like smoke.
Michael wiped away the thin film of sweat that had appeared on his forehead. No more spooky late-night reading for him. He was starting to freak himself out.
Five feet from the deck, the cat tensed. The puffy tail extended as it stretched its neck forward, testing the air.
Michael held his breath.
A white blur exploded out from beneath the deck, slamming into the cat with the suddenness of a lightning strike. The cat shrieked, tumbling into the shadows of the oak with its assailant in a struggling heap. They thrashed, half-visible in the darkness, growling and hissing as they fought.
Michael squinted, but all he could make out was a roiling mass of white and black.
A feral screech pierced the night, cut wickedly short. A line of dark fluid splashed against the oak.
Michael’s heart hammered in his chest. It had all happened so fast. He hadn’t gotten a decent look at what had come out from under the deck. Was the attacker a dog? It had to be a dog. Someone’s white, rabid, insane pit bull had murdered a cat in his yard. Now he had to wake the Wiffles. With a killer dog in the yard, he wasn’t about to go outside until the Humane Society’s equivalent of a SWAT team arrived to remove the animal.
He was about to fetch his foster parents when the “dog” stepped out of the shadows, standing not on four legs, but two. A bald little man, no more than two feet tall, came into the light, dragging the cat behind him.
Michael’s legs went rubbery, and he took hold of the windowsill to steady himself. “It’s not real.”
His hoarse denial did not banish the pale horror below.
The little man’s alabaster chest shone in the moonlight above a shimmering black kilt that reached down to his knobby knees. His hands and feet were large compared to his ropey frame, and one skinny arm gleamed dark and wet up to his elbow.
Michael’s thumping heart shook his chest like a drum. This had to be a dream, a nightmare.
As if to prove him wrong, three more little men in matching kilts crawled from under the deck to join the first.
Going to his knees, Michael rested his chin on his knuckles and peered down at the pasty gnomes in stark disbelief.
The cat killer tossed the furry carcass toward the others. The four formed a loose circle around the cat, crouching on all fours like monkeys. Their arms seemed disproportionately long for their bodies, and the ease with which they flowed into squatting positions suggested they spent as much time on all fours as on two legs. Together, the sinister quartet sniffed at the cooling corpse.
Michael’s stomach clenched. They were like little killer dolls. Like pasty, homicidal… dollmen.
As if reaching a silent consensus, the dollmen regained their feet together. The three latecomers nodded to the first dollman, and they scattered. They moved with incredible speed, disappearing into the darkness. The first dollman stared after the others for several moments before reaching down for the cat. Without warning, he whirled and peered up at Michael’s window.
Michael dropped to his belly.
Had the dollman seen him? Was the beast staring up at his room right now, waiting for him to stick out his head?
His ragged breathing seemed intolerably loud. He slapped a hand over his mouth and closed his eyes. This couldn’t be happening. A weird black cat had not died in the yard, and there were definitely not four alien, albino elves living under the deck. If he went to bed now, this would all make sense in the morning. He was having a hallucination or something. His imagination had invented the creepy miniature men out of thin air and comic books. This was a dream.
He opened his eyes and glanced up at the window above him. Dollmen didn’t exist. They couldn’t…right?
“Crud.”
He had to be sure. One quick peek, and he’d duck right back down.
“The famous last words of Bambi’s mother,” he muttered.
He took a deep breath, and popped his head above the windowsill. The yard was empty—no sign of the little men, or the dead cat. Nothing. No fur. No blood. He’d imagined the whole thing after all. He managed a quivering laugh. Little white men. Ha! He must be going bonkers. This was almost as bad as when he’d had chicken pox, when he’d thought the tooth fairy was sneaking out of the toilet to steal his lunch money.
He stood and reached to close the window. Even if a band of goblins hadn’t invaded the yard, no way he was leaving the window open tonight. A gust of wind blew through the oak, drawing Michael’s gaze to the swaying branches. The air left his lungs with a soft hiss.
A dollman clung to a branch not ten feet away. His face was nearly human, but
flatter, with a pointed chin and wide cheekbones. Where there should have been a nose, two vertical slits rested above unnaturally thin lips. The eyes were the most disturbing—of one color, without pupil or iris, they glimmered like twin pools of liquid mercury in the dark.
Michael pulled at the window, but his arms were like wet noodles. The window stuck.
The dollman looked from the deck to Michael, alien eyes calculating.
The thing was going to jump. The dollman was coming inside!
With a squealing whimper, Michael dragged down on the window with all the strength he could muster, but the frame refused to budge.
The pale lips peeled back, exposing a forest of needle-like fangs the color of grimy glass.
“The sleeping,” the dollman said in a voice like crumbling stone.
Michael jumped back, tripped over his feet, and fell on his butt. This was all a nightmare. He rolled to his hands and knees, scrambled to his bed, and pulled the covers over his head. This was all a nightmare, a nightmare…
Michael shivered beneath the sheets in a fetal ball, waiting for the monster outside to come and take him.
3
Sunset (The Present)
The sun finally disappeared behind Mrs. Finche’s roof.
Michael blinked, and noticed that bright red spots colored the insides of his eyelids. He had been staring at the sun too long. Someone had told him once that made you go blind. He hoped not. After last night, he had enough problems.
Two hours after dawn, he had finally summoned the courage to leave his bed and close the window. The wooden frame had slid down without so much as a squeak. He’d sworn he heard the window laughing at him. After getting dressed, he’d taken his backpack from the closet and filled it with jeans, a sweatshirt, two pairs of socks, fresh underwear, a dozen of his favorite comics, and a mostly full box of chewy chocolate-chip granola bars he kept in his bottom drawer in the event of late-night munchies. He’d tried to add another pair of jeans as well, but the pack had started to look like a swollen balloon. He’d hidden the backpack under his bed and gone downstairs for breakfast.
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