I haven't been participating regularly in the Storyblogging Carnival for a long while. Instead, I've been focused on revising
The Eyes of the Shadow, previously known as
Eyes in the Shadow, which can be found
here. It's been growing from novella-length to full novel length, with lots of details which I didn't previously know coming out and being incorportated into the story. The general strand of the story has remained unchanged, but some history, and hints at the all-important question of "Why?" are starting to emerge. So, while I'm on vacation, which in actuality is more of a Writing vacation, giving me time to write out the last few pieces to complete the greatly expanded version of
Eyes, I figured I'd share a little of what I've been working on. This submission is the new prologue of
The Eyes of the Shadow, and gives a small glimpse at Ryan's messed up childhood.
Prologue
Coming Home
Ryan took the bus home from Providence Middle School that day, with no after-school activities to keep him late, no science club or math club. He had no other activities that night, either, no karate practice or tutoring clients. He planned to do his homework and then read a book, maybe watch a little television. When the bus let him off at the stop sign, just a few houses down from his place, he headed for home straightaway. The sun was shining, and he enjoyed its warmth on his face, but the gnats which followed ensured he wouldn’t be spending much time outside. Some of the neighborhood kids would probably get a game of softball going, but Ryan wasn’t planning on participating. Aside from karate, which was very much an exercise in self-discipline rather than teamwork and competition, he wasn’t into sports, and while he was friendly with the other kids, he wasn’t really friends with them. They’d all known each other for years, while he’d only been here a few months. He didn’t make friends quickly or easily, and given how frequently his family moved, it had been a long time since he’d had a real friend.
Eleven twenty-six was affixed in large metal numerals right beside the white door at the front of the two story yellow house. Ryan reached into one jean pocket, then checked the other, before finding the loose key. Since it was his one and only key, he didn’t bother with a keychain. He already had the key in hand when he realized that the front door was open.
There was no car in the driveway, and they had yet to clear all the boxes out of the garage, so there could be no car hidden in there. Still, he shoved the key into his pocket as he pushed open the door. “Mom? Dad? I’m home.” There was no response. Not even their dog, a black and white English Springer Spaniel named Dozer, appeared, and he always came running when someone entered the house. Of course, Dozer was usually aimed for the front door, trying to get out. He loved to get outside on his own, and he loved it even more when someone chased him. He’d stay just out of reach, running a bit farther whenever his pursuer got close, then turn around and wait, tongue lolling out of his panting mouth, looking for all the world like he was grinning at you. Usually the best thing to do was just to let him run loose. He’d come back whining at the door eventually. If the door was open, then most likely Dozer had already run off, and he wouldn’t be back before dark unless Ryan went looking for him. The more important question was why the door was open in the first place.
Closing the door behind him, Ryan moved deeper into the house. “Hello?” he called. He did a quick circuit of the first floor—living room, dining room, kitchen, den, and half-bath. So far, no one. He even opened the garage door, but there was no one and no car, only piles of still packed boxes from the last move. They looked even more disorganized than he remembered them, and a few of them were open with some books and other odds and ends sitting beside them. He closed the door and went upstairs.
The three bedrooms were more than his small family needed, so his father had made one of them into a study. Ryan’s own room was unoccupied, as was the master bedroom, but he saw that someone had left one of his father’s dresser drawers open. A quick glance showed nothing besides socks and underwear inside, and not too much of those. It must be time to do laundry. The study was undisturbed.
Ryan was beginning to feel uneasy. He distinctly remembered locking the door when he had been the last one to leave in the morning. If his parents had returned for some reason, they wouldn’t have left the door open when they went. They could hardly miss Dozer sprinting out the door as they left. The only other possibility which was occurring to him was that someone had broken in. Intruders usually avoided houses with dogs, but it’s not like Dozer would have done more than sniff at him before bolting out the door. If someone had invaded his home, what had he done? Riffle through his father’s sock drawer? Unpack a couple of boxes? Ryan hadn’t noticed anything missing. If it was an intruder, had Ryan scared him off? Or was he still here somewhere?
Ryan returned to the master bedroom with some trepidation. He was probably being silly. Just because the door was open didn’t mean some thief had broken into his home. Silly or not, he wasn’t taking any chances. He went straight to his father’s walk-in closet and turned on the light, carefully looking over all the shirts, pants, and jackets to make sure no one was there. The clothes were just sparse enough that there was no space where someone could be hidden, which struck him as unusual, as the closet was normally stuffed. And weren’t the suitcases usually sitting in that corner? Well, there was no time to worry about it now. Satisfied that no one was hiding in the closet, he pushed aside some winter coats. Where was it? It should be here… ah. It was lying among the winter boots, tossed carelessly on top of them. He pulled the flat leather sheathe free. The leather was decorated with ornate symbols, a stylized sunburst among scrollwork, and hung with tassels. It looked fancy, but he knew it was just a gimmicky exterior to lure tourists. He was pretty sure his father had gotten it in Mexico. It wasn’t a real weapon. The machete was too dull and too old to do much damage to anything besides weeds, and having tried its edge against said vegetation, Ryan could testify that it wasn’t much good against that either. Still, he grabbed the black plastic handle and pulled it free. The wide, flat blade was patterned with both dark and light stains, some of which were probably rust. Still, it was better than nothing.
Feeling slightly more secure with the blade in his hand, Ryan next checked the master bath, then his mother’s walk-in closet. Nothing and no one to be found, though he’d had to push aside a lot of soft fabric to be certain. He rechecked his own bedroom and his own small closet, then the study, then the bathroom. All clear. Now it was time to go back downstairs. He switched the machete to his left so he could wipe the sweat from his right hand on his jeans. He felt ridiculous holding this cheap, weed-whacking sword. If he came upon his mother or father while waving this thing around, he was going to be dreadfully embarrassed. He’d be even more embarrassed if he went running out of his house and called the police from a neighbor’s only to find that he’d been chased out by his own imagination. That left going through the house himself, just to be sure, and hoping that his fears were as groundless as he thought they were.
Ryan searched the first floor again, this time looking in every corner and opening every closet: half-bath, living room, dining room, and kitchen. He didn’t call out, as he didn’t want to give himself away if there was someone who shouldn’t be there. Everything looked to be as it should be. When he got to the den, he looked carefully for any signs of disturbance. It looked like a wrecking crew had been through, with magazines burying the coffee table and spilling to the floor, laundry on the couch, tapes scattered in front of the stereo and video tapes in front of the VCR. The vertical blinds in front of the sliding glass doors were twisted and bent out of shape. All of which meant that the den looked like it always did, and none of the holy trinity of valuable electronics—the stereo, VCR, and television—were missing. Any thief would have been welcome to the wallpaper. The orange, yellow, and gray clouds with silver lining were almost as atrocious as the avocado green which had decorated the kitchen, or the mural of a rusted tugboat they had discovered under the freaky clown wallpaper in
his bedroom. His family hadn’t gotten around to saving the den from its decorating nightmare yet, but Ryan was just as glad not to need to paint another room yet. Satisfied that the room was clear, he went into the garage and checked behind the boxes. There were lots of places for a person to hide there, but no one hiding. The boxes were not how he remembered them, however. They had never been neatly stacked, but they had at least been shoved into one corner. Now it looked like someone had pulled some of the boxes out of that pile, and new, off-kilter stacks with bigger boxes on top of smaller ones had formed. Several boxes lay out by themselves, surrounded by their strewn about contents. If anything had been taken, it didn’t show, but there was no way to tell in this mess. He did notice that most of the open boxes contained books and odds and ends belonging to his father. Maybe he had been looking for something. He left the garage more suspicious that something was wrong than before. He could hear his heart in his ears in the house’s silence, and his arms were trembling. Telling himself that he wasn’t scared, that he had no reason to be scared, he turned to the last place he had to search. The basement.
Ryan crept down the stairs to the basement, listening the steps creak beneath him. They were covered by an ugly shag carpet in an amorphous red and blue pattern which he’d hated since he first saw it. At the bottom, the stairs ended at a wood paneled wall. To the right, through shuttered doors, was the laundry room. To the left, back along the stairs, was the main room of the basement. It was practically empty, aside from a bookshelf along the wall he stood by, and clearly unoccupied. Even in the dim light coming from the high half window on the far wall he could see that much. He turned the light in the laundry room on and quickly glanced inside. No one. He looked back into the long room of the finished basement, trying the light switch, but the bulb was dead. That didn’t surprise him. They rarely used this room, and for a very simple reason. There was a door in the back, which opened to a sunken patio with stairs to the backyard. The drain in the cement well could not be cleared by any means his family could discover, so the patio might as well have been a pool. It filled up every time it rained, flooding the basement. The smell of mildew still hung heavy in the air, even though it hadn’t rained in weeks. On the left wall near the back door was another door, opening to an unused study. That flooded too. They’d lost a nice set of encyclopedias, along with a bunch of other books, to the flooding and the accompanying mildew shortly after moving into this house. The door to the study was now closed, as was the back door to the sunken patio.
He’d looked everywhere else. If he was going to do a thorough job of it, there was only one place left. Ryan crossed the room in quick strides, the scent of mildew filling his nostrils. He sneezed, and as he recovered his breath through his mouth, he almost gagged on a strange metallic taste that coated his tongue. What could cause that? Reaching the door to the downstairs study, he hesitated, suddenly uncertain that he wanted to see what was on the other side.
Don’t be silly. It’s just the study. There’s nothing to be afraid of! He tightened his grip on the useless machete, then twisted the knob and shoved the door open.
The stench of it hit him first. A familiar scent in small quantities, but foreign in its massiveness. The air was thick with it, more metallic than organic, and salty on his tongue. All his eyes could see in the dark, windowless room, all they were willing to see, was a mess, boxes strewn about, the metal strongbox containing their most important documents lying open and upside down on the floor, the papers falling out. The floor looked damp, as if they hadn’t completely dried it out the last time it flooded. And in the center, something that looked like a stained white blanket, now wet and ragged. He reached for the light switch, then snatched his fingers back when they touched something sticky. He wiped them on his jeans and tried again, this time flicking the switch on.
When he saw it, he doubled over, gagging. Nothing came up, and Ryan almost wished something would, that his body would keep him distracted from what he’d seen. Bent over, all he could see were his jeans; that and the crimson smear on them where he’d wiped his fingers off. No, there was no escape there. He looked up again, looked at the red liquid that dampened the carpet, the torn and limp form it had come from. It was almost unrecognizable, black and white and so much red. It looked like a hacked and misshapen toy, not a purebred English Springer Spaniel. Surely that large pool of blood could not have come from a single medium-sized dog. That unmoving, dead
thing in the middle of the study floor bore no resemblance to Dozer, but Ryan knew it was him.
Ryan didn’t need to check that he was dead. When his unsteady steps brought him close enough that he could begin to recognize the individual parts of the form in front of him, he could tell. The head was nearly severed from the neck, not by a single cut, but by a trio of gashes in it. One leg was severed, another bent over backwards. An ear was cut off, a squashed eye hanging from the socket, great gouges carved out of his side so that the ribs and even the organs beneath showed. Dear God, if the dog had still lived, Ryan would have seen its heart beating. Whatever had done this hadn’t used a sharp blade. The cuts weren’t clean, but ragged, more tears than cuts. It might not have been a blade at all, just something thin and long swung with enough force to penetrate… he looked again at the machete in his hand, looked at the rust stains. His hand trembled when he reached for it, as his nail scraped the rust and it flaked off. It wasn’t rust.
He dropped the machete, practically threw it to the floor. His mind was screaming at him to hold onto it, that all his fears of an intruder weren’t so irrational anymore, that he
needed it, but his physical revulsion at this sight, at the atrocious tool which had done it, overwhelmed rationality.
There was a clack of wood against wood and Ryan looked up. In the wall in front of him was a two foot by two foot door, really just plywood on hinges set at chest height. It led to a crawlspace, nothing more than a few feet of air between packed dirt and the supports for the first floor. Unable to use the basement for storage, they kept a few odds and ends in there, mostly old things his father called heirlooms. That clack had to have come from the door, but… Whatever courage had taken Ryan this far fled him. When the door began to push open, creaking on the hinges, Ryan turned and ran.
This story is a 2,677 word excerpt of an 80,000 word novel.
I was told, after I'd shown this story to my writing group, that I'd done something either very brave or very foolish by killing off the dog in this prologue. The American public, my friends told me, is very squeamish about violence to animals. When I first started writing this chapter, I didn't know that Ryan would find anything in the basement. It wasn't until I was about halfway through that I realized that the build-up demanded some payoff and Ryan would have to find something there, and that something would be a body. Given that, the choice was whether the body would be animal or human, and if the public is more squeamish about dead animals than dead people, well, then, I'm sorry. That's just the way it worked out, and as the details come out later in the book, it makes more sense this way.
If you want more, you can read the original version of this story,
Eyes in the Shadow. It won't answer any of your questions about the dog, however, and if you want the complete story, you'll have to wait for the book.
