Chapter 1 – Wake up, Franny.
Middleberg is a middle-size town in the middle of the country. But sometimes…in my dreams…it felt like someplace else—somehow familiar, but also very strange. Middleberg is where I live, and so does something…else. Some people thought Middleberg was dull, that nothing ever happened here. Well, they were very wrong.
Even in a place like Middleberg, nestled safely in the bosom of the American Dream, between the big city lights and gritty urban decay, a dark cloud of corruption could suffuse the air, moving like a thunderhead over acres of perfect little white houses with emerald green lawns. It could settle in an oily film over the banal tedium of suburban life to spread its corrosive bile.
On an otherwise lovely night in the picturesque metropolis, such a cloud floated above the town square, obscuring the twinkling stars overhead. The trees of the square—Black Maple, River Birch, Hickory, Sweet Gum, Buckeye, Dogwood and Ash—all bent beneath the weight of the darkness as it drifted toward the great Middleberg town hall and the clock tower, Old Henry, so named for Henry Oldfellow Middle, the town's founder.
The statues of children below, frozen forever in their bronze prison, stared on with their eternal gaze as the gargantuan iron hands of the clock began to spin out of time, faster and faster of an accord not their own. No person, not one all night shopkeeper or third shift truck driver, would notice the hands gliding over the dial's face or hear the bloodcurdling squeal of the grinding gears within.
The target was not the skeletal buildings of concrete and steel, stuffed with faux-wood desks and stacked story upon story with reflective blocks of floor-to-ceiling glass. No, it was beyond the city, outwards, where the lines of the Transit Express came to a halt, the only way forward being back. Its reign would be where terror was served best, a pocket of the suburban sprawl of middle-America, where children played dangerously in the street away from the lazy eye of the nanny and aging mothers past their prime suffered from empty-nest syndrome with designer wine glasses cradled in their bony hands. Other demons had and always would be present, but of an entirely different kind.
As the time stood, those very captives lay in their beds dreaming Ambien dreams, unaware of that dark cloud rolling across the starry sky, ever closer. In Middleberg, all was quiet and unassuming as its denizens slept a fragile sleep—one that would be disturbed all too soon.
For darkness travels quickly.
Across town in a her family house, indistinguishable from any other in the neighborhood, snuggled deep in dry and comfy linens, Frances Bacon McCausland lay engaged in a bout of fitful sleep. Brow furrowed, her subconscious tore against the fragile fabric of the dream world, disturbed by a growing discomfort she did not comprehend.
Outside, the night which had been calm was now stirred by a forceful breeze that pushed flat the blades of grass in undulating waves of milky green.
"Franny."
A voice, barely audible, drifted along those shimmering waves, making the tips of tulips dry and brittle by its very command. It carried dead leaves and loose fragments of residential debris along the street in a frenzied cyclone of spinning candy wrappers and crumpled fast food receipts.
"Wake up, Franny."
Up against the two-door garage it rushed like a squall against a boarded seaside hut, eliciting tired groans under the weight of its onslaught. Tendrils like slender fingers pressed against every surface, used the elegant brick siding as a scratching pad, felt its way upward…upward…flooding into the gutters as it climbed.
Through the windows like frost on a winter night, along the corridors of cedar baseboards and vanilla crème carpet, flattened like a serpent to slide beneath the door until that dark cloud finally gathered into corporeal form and gazed at the girl with tousled red hair, asleep and oblivious in a world about to shatter forever.
She would be so easy to touch…so easy to destroy…but there was fun to be had, games to be played.
And vengeance—the greatest prize of all.
As the slender shadow drifted across the wall, the glowing red numbers on the bedside alarm clock began to speed up, ticking away the minutes like dominoes, out of sync with the flow of the night. One after another they melted into a new hour, and soon another in turn.
"There's so much work to be done," the voice rasped. Bending down to close the space between cracked, grey lips and pale, delicate ear, whispering. "Wake up, Franny. I want to play."