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  Ryan's Suffering

  Shadow Walker Series Book 1

  Published by Lloyd Paulson at Smashwords

  Copyright 2014 Lloyd Paulson

  www.LloydPaulson.com

  [email protected]

  *Cover image incorporates Scott Robinson's The Handle Comet.

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this eBook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part I: Darkness Falls

  Ghost of Darkness

  Insomnia Falls

  Dreamland Replicants

  Corn-Fucked Wasteland Binge Drinking

  The School of Infinite Patience and Control

  The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men

  The Past Comes Rushing In

  Dance of the Pigs

  The Mystery Benefactor

  The Forsaken Soul

  Part II: The Fog Rises

  A Walk in the Woods

  The Basement of Despair

  Replicants Rising

  The Rough Beasts

  The Covenant

  Part III: The Dark of Night

  The Abyss

  The Dam and Damnation

  The Mason House

  Moloch's Due

  Dedication

  To my lovely wife Jenn, who found me when I was walking out the other side of a personal black hell in the journey of depression so many years ago, and chose to walk through the journey of life with me. May the wonder never cease.

  Prologue

  Without spoiling things, but to be perfectly blunt and up front; this book deals in some very dark and disturbing subject matters, sometimes from odd viewpoints and stances that may not be agreeable, such as mental illness and treatment from a negative viewpoint, and it contains disturbing subjects such as child abuse, sexual assault, and murder of children. They’re necessary to the story line itself. I have full faith I can tell an engaging story, without resorting to cheap thrills for the hell of it—although some will claim that's just ego talking—however, in my defense, remove mental illness or child abuse from the equation, and this story rapidly falls apart. They’re essential to the tale I have to tell. Without those elements, there’s no cohesion, no reason for existence behind this tale.

  I prefer to be direct, and up front, as opposed to whopping you upside the head unnecessarily. If that isn’t what you’re expecting, you can safely stop here; with most of your sensibilities and good (?) taste relatively intact…well, except for part one chapter four’s title if you read the table of contents, anyway. "Corn-Fucked Wasteland Binge Drinking." Wonderfully and deliciously descriptive, isn't it?

  However, if you’re willing to walk with me further, then let’s continue this dark and terrible journey. I forewarned you. I didn’t have the good sense not to write it, and some critics will lambast me, which doesn’t particularly bother me. In the end, I wrote this for me, and I had no choice in the matter. That’s a deep and terrible truth, darkly true for many writers, and I have enough demons already, thank you very much. We pretend that we have a muse, but that’s just self-delusion. Muses are demonic slave drivers. I didn’t need this demon too; but since I’m stuck with it, I am conceited enough to be sharing what it produced with you.

  You may choose to read this, and that would make us cohorts in this dark endeavor. You’re free to decide how enjoyable your thrill ride was in this exchange, and you’re always free to drop me a line or leave feedback on your experience. Good or bad, I encourage you to do so. I don’t mind if it isn’t all good feedback. I expect to piss some people off. I’m not going to get into verbal "fuck you" contests over my content and style. More to the point, yes, I have a foul mouth. Yes, I write about depraved subject matters. No, I don't get to pick what I write about; I'm just along for the ride. The muse cranks it out; I copy it down. What am I going to do, soften it up and write about ponies and daffodils? If I attempted that, I'd be turning out bullshit sappy drivel that no one would want to read. So tell me what you loved, and tell me what you hated. How else can I improve? Hell, in some cases, what some people hate, other people will gobble up. So, fuck censorship. That's my motto.

  As it sits, this is a fantastically fictional tale, but I will say this; like any author’s work, this is an amalgam. It’s drawn from my life’s experiences, things I’ve seen, news I’ve read, issues I care about, and stories I’ve heard. This story was extremely difficult to write—and if you lived with me when I was a child, I’d suggest that you put the book down and walk the fuck away. You’re not going to want to read this.

  For everyone else, this is a very dark road to walk down, and I hope it provides a wild roller coaster of a ride for you that justifies the time you spend following me down this bizarre path. However, I also hope that it also provides some illumination into the darker side of human nature, and while I hope you enjoy it, above all else, I hope it haunts you, I hope it makes you think.

  Therefore, I hope you’ll sit for a spell. See if it draws you in. We’re not here to talk about me. We’ll save the rest of that for another time, and another place. I have a dark story to tell. We’re much more interested in the tale of a lost soul named Ryan Turner, in the town of Dark Harbor, Michigan. Ryan’s a tortured soul, with his own demons.

  Let us listen in to the musings of the haunted and the insane.

  -D. Lloyd Paulson

  Part I: Darkness Falls

  Of heaven and hell, I knew not of either. Only that somewhere in between, we were forced to forge our own way.

  Contemplate this though. This is what one old man, a neighbor, whispered hoarsely to me, as he sat drinking whiskey on the rocks at his dining room table, curtains drawn to keep it dark and to give the air conditioning a fighting chance to keep it cool inside despite the dreadfully hot and humid summer afternoon outside.

  He said he was unshakably confident in his belief that there is a heaven, because he was convinced we all were already living out our life sentences in hell.

  I think on that often. By my birth alone, a very ancient covenant sealed my fate. Hell is my destiny.

  I’ve seen things. Done things. Witnessed things. Terrible things. Horrible things. Cruel things. Unspeakable things. There is no redemption. There can be no hope. There will be no reprieve.

  Perhaps he was right. How do we know we aren’t already in Hell?

  Ghost of Darkness

  "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, and a hell of heaven." – John Milton, "Paradise Lost", 1667

  I sat quietly on the glider on my back porch, sipping the shitty tasting contents of a can of Black Bay Brewing Company's Steelhead Lager. Black Bay Brewing Company was pretentious enough to rob the noble fish names of the salmon that fought their way from the Atlantic and up into the Great Lakes. Steelhead. Coho. Chinook. Stupid shit like that.

  Black Bay’s Steelhead at least had a name that sounded like a badass motherfucker. Black Bay Brewing Company, Dark Harbor, Michigan. Steelhead Lager. Those names sounded like they could kick some ass and come back demanding seconds. What could be manlier? Steelhead was a name built for a road-hardened biker that had served hard time cooking meth in Death Valley, and had the cajones to single-handedly fist-fuck a pissed-off two-thousand pound bull on a five-dollar bet. Hard core rock-n-roll, right?
You’d be nuts to fuck with him. Don’t even look at him cockeyed. Steelhead, and don't you fucking forget it.

  I was pissed that they suckered me into buying some of their shitty beer, though. Cocksuckers. That’s ten bucks that I could have wasted on beer that can’t even bother to spell "light" right; but at least it wouldn’t have tasted like it dripped out of the crotch of a ten -dollar whore the night all the cash assistance comes in on the bridge card accounts. For the welfare and/or Michigander illiterate, Michigan pays welfare benefits like food stamps and cash assistance on a credit card with a PIN that features a picture of the Mackinac Bridge, hence the name "Bridge Card". The Mackinac Bridge connects the Lower Peninsula to the Upper Peninsula, or the U.P, as in land of the yoopers. Also as in land of "pasties". Don’t ask if you don’t know what pasties are. If you must try one, no, they are not donuts. Yes, you want gravy, because it’s like a dried-out turd of a potpie.

  The evening crickets chirped in my backyard, gaining their confidence and their voices as the gloaming deepened, indifferent to the vague rumbling of thunder rolling in the distant west out beyond the harbor, beyond Black Bay, and over the indifferent rolling waves of Lake Michigan. Under the storm, though, the winds would be whipping the lake into a treacherous frenzy that the saltiest and hardiest of sailors would shudder to witness; the Great Lakes have always been cold-hearted, vicious, relentless, and unforgiving.

  Our house was on the southeast side of Dark Harbor, not far from the main highway that runs north and south. This particular hot and humid August evening was shifting through a soft and slow transition between day and night. Mosquitoes buzzed in my ears as they hovered in a shifting cloud, eager to land, attracted by the heat that baked through the sweat that rolled off my brow. Normally the high-pitched whine would annoy me, but I ignored them. My shirt hung on me, damp and thick from the humidity and the sweat. Michigan was a monstrous swampland, and humidity is omnipresent in all seasons, amplifying the heat of summer, and putting sharp, biting teeth into the chill of winter. You can’t escape water; it’s everywhere. Endless lakes, streams, and swamps. You want water? Punch a well. Where doesn’t matter too fucking much. If you have to go 200 feet down to hit water, you’re either unlucky or you’re an idiot. Don’t punch a well from the top of a hill, fuckstick.

  At the back edge of the lawn in the backyard, the tangled and forbidding undergrowth of bushes blended into the trees of the dark woods behind it. My children’s toys were scattered throughout the yard, their silhouettes were dissolving into amorphous shapes in the grass, exotic and threatening at the same time. The children’s personal daytime playground had slipped sideways within reality, leaving behind ghosts and shifting shadows. I could almost hear the faint echoes of innocent laughter from the children’s daytime romp, and I could almost hear echoes of my own childhood. Almost.

  Through the torn and dirty screen in the open and grease-streaked kitchen window behind me, I heard the low voices on the television drifting out of the living room, where I knew my children were sprawled out, blurry eyed and ready for sleep after a hard day of playing in the yard. I felt a low sense of dread, wondering about the ill mood my wife was in, and a feeling of helplessness overwhelmed me about how bad things had become between Trish and me. The reproachful looks from dinner were still very much on my mind, and I pushed those thoughts to the back of my mind again and tried to return to the peacefulness of nightfall.

  We were on the downhill slope of a marriage. Trish and I were trapped in the ‘I’m always a fucking asshole/she’s always a life-sucking bitch’ downward death-spiral, and I felt powerless to stop it. A supernova blow-up was rushing headlong forward towards us, relentless, terrible, and inevitable, like a train wreck where the engineer had already thrown the lever on the brakes and the only other thing left to do was put your head between your knees, pucker up, and kiss your fucking ass goodbye. The rest was inertia at work. With heavy paraphrasing, Newton’s First Law, is to wit: Inertia is an ice-cold heartless cock-knocking relentless fucking bitch. Don’t believe me? It’s easy to test. Set your cruise next time you’re blasting along at 85 mph on the freeway and then step out of your car. That’s inertia, up close and personal, motherfucker.

  To defuse the brewing situation with Trish, I had escaped out here, hoping it would release enough of the building tension to delay the impending outburst, at least for a little while. Imploding relationships have their own relentless inertia. The hate, the vitriol, was predictable and pointless. We had done it all before, but it seemed like we were destined to repeat the arguments every day, like a listless stage production. "Act 3, scene 2. She enters stage left…"

  Even on days where we didn’t argue the tension simmered, seething and hot, threatening to boil just beneath the surface, a festering sore that would never heal. Even when we weren’t bickering with each other and just let the tension build, I still argued with her continuously within the confines of my mind. In reality, we kept having the same arguments, full of the same accusations, recycling the same recriminations with the same inevitable results. If I couldn’t prevent the argument, perhaps delay was possible, and so here I was avoiding her, sitting and staring into the backyard.

  The world’s drift into twilight was entrancing, and I needed the escape and reprieve. Staring had the interesting effect of almost revealing the world beneath, as though reality was a veneer worn thin from hard use. It was as though the toys in the backyard were molting, shedding their deceptive shrouds of plastic, revealing the horrid deformities that had been hidden within.

  I felt as if the toys knew that I was watching, and would only continue morphing into hellish objects when I wasn’t looking. Every time I glanced away, I swore I saw them move at the peripheral edge of my vision, malignant and aware. I was on edge, yet peaceful. A delicate balance, masterful in its elegance, a razor's edge of fine balance. I felt the hair on the back of my neck almost crawling, as though preternatural, ghostly fingers were hovering, its dark and malignant energy thrumming millimeters away, wanting, but not quite daring to contact me.

  Perhaps the spirit was wishing that it could force me to turn to watch the discarded toy’s painful, liquid, and slow transformation into artifacts of the pit. The hairs on the back of my neck were standing on end, pulled toward that negative energy; my skin crawling as though lightning were about to strike. I remained calm. My breathing was slow and regular. When I glanced back at the shape-shifting toys, their slow, black, and oozing movement ceased, yet always at the edge of my vision, I could detect the faintest movement from another toy’s molt into rot, shifting, and wriggling. As soon as I looked in that direction, it would stop, dark, breathing, and aware—resentful and hating, a pulsing putrescence—while another object started shifting elsewhere in the yard.

  This singular moment was dark and magical. It was as though time had become soft, flexible, a fluid that could be stretched and manipulated through the force of will. Each second seemed slower than the last. I felt buoyant and peaceful, yet so alive. My problems, my stresses, my worries were inconsequential. They are so rare, these moments of almost perfect clarity.

  It was as though I knew and understood the true meaning of life, yet there was no one there to understand and receive the wisdom. The clarity of expression danced at the forefront of thought in anticipation of a final release. It was if now suddenly I could speak, if only someone could listen.

  It would pass, though. Time would resume its normal passage, and the understanding would finally retreat, restrained again, unknown and muted. Each moment must be savored, enjoyed like a delicate dessert prepared by a master chef. Each bite, each moment was divine, exquisite, poignant, yet sad.

  A harsh stuttering coughing sound came from my left, yet I was not startled. I turned to face the noise coming from my neighbor’s yard. A loud, stuttering hiss undercut the cough, and the noise settled into a softer staccato "Shrup! Shrup! Shrup!" A rabbit bolted in fright from under the lilac bushes that separated my yard from my neighbor�
�s, his frantic, zigzagging flee of fright frenzied yet silent, his grey form disappearing into the gloom at the far edge of my lawn. I realized the neighbor must have installed a timer on his lawn sprinkler.

  On my right, I heard the soft stuttering buzz of the neighbors’ mercury vapor light attempting to struggle into life on the front of their garage. The light was faint, and I turned to watch, fascinated, as each second struggled by. The light stayed on, tenuous at first. The light gained strength, and before long, the first moth flitted around the light, attracted by powerful and ancient instincts it was helpless to resist, drawn towards the light.

  In the distance, I also heard a dog’s pitiful and lonely barking, closer to the highway to the east that heads north towards Traverse City, but even this didn’t disrupt my feeling of tranquility. Often, late at night, when only the deepest of fellow insomniacs would be awake, when I could detect the faint and imperceptible lightening of the entire night sky that signaled the approach of dawn, I would hear this dog’s lonesome desperate bark through the open window of our bedroom. Bizarrely, I felt a kinship with this canine that I had never seen, and probably never would. Perhaps he, like I, had stared into the dark long enough, and was protesting the shapes that wouldn’t stop moving and approaching within that darkness.

  The depths of insomnia, zero dark thirty, is the time of day where I contemplate that night eleven years ago, and wonder what happened. What part did I play? How much like my father am I? So many unanswered questions. The answers were locked inside my head. Is the truth so horrific that even I didn’t want to face it? The horrors were so infamous that they hit the national tabloids like a blaze, and the nation guzzled it down and screamed for free refills. While I was still in the hospital afterwards, I quietly became someone else, and due to the ongoing investigation, the court records were sealed. My privacy was all I had left, and I had treated that privacy like gold. Not even Trish knew about that night. Disassociation, baby.